Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a new and powerful programming paradigm. Two crucial issues are addressed by AOP: separation of concerns and composition. Our interest lies in AOP for distributed applications.
Modern distributed applications, either object-oriented (eg with CORBA or RMI), or component-oriented (with DCOM, EJB, or CCM) are most of the time complex pieces of software. They require the integration of many functionalities: some have special needs in terms of communication, others in terms of safety, security, availability, fault-tolerance, data replication and/or mobility. In our project, each of these system functionalities is addressed as an aspect.
Above all things AOP goals are to provide a way to implement these functionalities in separate software entities, and to compose them to provide a running distributed application. This process is known as aspect weaving, and is realized by an aspect weaver.
The short-term goal of our project is to take advantage of the flexibility and the reconfiguration techniques brought by the VVM to implement efficient aspect weaving VMlets. Our middle-term goal is to define a framework for generic aspect-oriented programming models.
Lionel Seinturier
Last modification on: Tue Apr 17 2001 - 09:57:48