[Colloq] PhD Thesis Proposal - Sergei Kojarski, April 12

[Rachel Kalweit]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Sergei Kojarski

Thesis Title:
Third-Party Composition of Multiple AOP Mechanisms

Time and place: Tuesday, April 12, 12:00 noon, 102 WVG

Abstract:

A current trend in Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)
is the usage of general-purpose AOP languages.  However,
a general-purpose AOP language lacks the expressiveness to
tackle all cases of crosscutting.  A solution to unanticipated
crosscutting concerns is to create and combine different
domain-specific aspect mechanisms to form new AOP functionality.
As of yet, there is no methodology to facilitate this process.

Current AOP languages integrate a specific aspect mechanism with
a base language and as a result have a fixed, non-extensible
AOP functionality.  The thesis to be presented is that
an appropriate design of an aspect mechanism will enable
multiple, independent aspect mechanisms to be subject to
third-party composition.  Multiple independent mechanisms
can then be composed into a multi-mechanism AOP language,
similar to the assembly of software components.

The main insight is that the aspect mechanism can be
decoupled from the base mechanism.  In the proposed approach,
the individual aspect mechanisms are: units of independent
production (the mechanisms are defined independently), units
of composition (the mechanisms are subject to third-party
composition), and units of collaboration (the semantics for
the composed multi-mechanism is provided by all the mechanisms
collectively).

Advisor: David H. Lorenz