Conference Papers: PCDiff: Attacking the Fragile Pointcut Problem, Abstract

Aspect oriented programming has been proposed as a way to improve modularity of software systems by allowing encapsulation of cross-cutting concerns. To do so, aspects specify where new functionality should apply using pointcuts. Unfortunately todays mainstream aspect oriented languages suffer from pointcut languages where pointcut declarations result in a high coupling between aspect and base system. Additionally, these pointcuts are fragile, as non-local changes easily may break pointcut semantics. These properties are a major obstacle for program evolution of aspect oriented software. This paper introduces a pointcut delta analysis to deal with this problem.