Generic, Property Based Queries for Evolvable Weaving Specifications

In the current aspect-oriented languages, advices and pointcuts are explicitly associated in general. This results in weaving specifications that are less evolvable and need more maintenance during the development of a system. To address this issue, we propose associative access to advices and aspects: a designating mechanism that allows for referring aspect/advices through their (syntactic and semantic) properties in advice-pointcut bindings. First, this paper presents an extensive analysis of the advicepointcut binding mechanisms of the state-of-the-art AOP approaches. Based on this analysis, we extend the current weaving (superimposition) specification of our aspect-oriented approach, Compose*. In the new specification, we apply queries that can designate filtermodules and other type of units (e.g. annotations) based on their properties. As an evaluation of our work, we present a tradeoff analysis about the new weaving specification with respect to several software engineering properties, in particular expressiveness, evolvability and comprehensibility. Finally, the paper ends with related works and conclusion.