A unified context activation mechanism

Abstract

With the increase of research interest in context-oriented programming (COP), several COP languages with different characteristics have been proposed. Although they share common language features to modularize context-dependent variations of behavior, they take quite different ways to realize them. Because of such differences, each language cannot solely cover all use cases of implementing context-dependent behavioral variations. In this paper, we propose a new COP language Javanese that unifies several COP mechanisms into general linguistic constructs. Specifically, it provides context declarations to identify context and its specification of the range of execution sequences where this context is active, activate declarations to define the relation between contexts and layers, and context group declarations that modularize these declarations and specify the set of instances where they are applied. This paper describes design of Javanese and an implementation strategy. Copyright 2013 ACM.