Robert Filman

For many applications, most code is not devoted to implementing the primary input-output functionality but instead addresses other concerns, such as reliability, availability, responsiveness, performance, security, and manageability. Conventional programming practice requires the programmer to keep all these other ilities in mind while coding and to explicitly invoke behavior at exactly the right places to achieve them.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is an emerging technology for allowing the separate specification and coding of multiple concerns, while nevertheless providing mechanisms to automatically meld these separate expressions into working programs. In this talk I will present a pair of AOP systems, our past work on the Object Infrastructure Framework (OIF) and our current work on event-based quantification, and provide some observations on the distinguishing characteristics of AOP technology.

OIF is a distributed object technology that implements separate concerns as dynamic wrappers on object components. Interesting elements of OIF include its mechanisms for application and aspect communication, its dynamic nature, and its language for expressing where aspects apply to base code. I will also describe our initial work on event-based quantification, an attempt to map directed and widely the interesting properties of programs into transformations that realize those properties.