Expressing component-relating aspects with graph transformations

Abstract

Aspect Oriented Programming (see [3]) is an attempt to deal with so-called cross-cutting concerns and the tangled code that often results from them. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of developing a lightweight rule-based representation of aspects, enabling one to discuss and reason about aspects at a high level of abstraction. It is shown, for a concrete example, that aspects can be represented by graph transformation systems, and that the extension of a base program by an aspect can be viewed as a composition of graph transformation systems. We focus on aspects that do not modify the base program's behavior, but that can only allow or disallow its execution. We elaborate on an aspect concerning synchronization, after which we discuss ways to generalize our approach to other aspects, and to situations where several aspects are combined. © Springer-Verlag 2004.