research-article

"Program, enhance thyself!": demand-driven pattern-oriented program enhancement

Authors:

Godmar BackAuthors Info & Claims

AOSD '08: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development

Pages 13 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/1353482.1353485

Published: 31 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Program enhancement refers to adding new functionality to an existing program. We argue that repetitive program enhancement tasks can be expressed as patterns, and that the application of such enhancement patterns can be automated. This paper presents a novel approach to pattern-oriented automated enhancement of object-oriented programs. Our approach augments the capabilities of an aspect compiler to capture the programmer's intent to enhance a program. In response to the programmer referencing a piece of functionality that is non-existent, our approach automatically synthesizes aspect code to supply the required functionality transparently. To improve flexibility and facilitate reuse, the synthesis and application of the new functionality is guided by declarative whenthen rules, concisely expressed using a rule base.

Our extensible automated program enhancement system, called DRIVEL¹, extends the AspectJ compiler with aspect generating capabilities. The generation is controlled using the DROOLS rules engine. To validate our approach and automated tool, we have created a collection of enhancement libraries and used DRIVEL to apply them to the LibX Edition Builder, a large-scale, widely-used Web application. DRIVEL automatically enhanced the LibX Edition Builder's XML processing modules with structural navigation capabilities and caching, eliminating the need to implement this functionality by hand.

References

[1]

Back, G. Datascript - a specification and scripting language for binary data. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering Proceedings (GPCE 2002), published as LNCS 2487 (Pittsburgh, PA, Oct. 2002), ACM, pp. 66--77.

Digital Library

[2]

Bailey, A., and Back, G. LibX-a Firefox extension for enhanced library access. Library Hi Tech 24, 2 (2006), 290--304.

[3]

Basili, V., and Boehm, B. COTS-based systems top 10 list. Computer 34, 5 (2001), 91--95.

Digital Library

[4]

Boehm, B., and Abts, C. COTS integration: Plug and pray? Computer 32, 1 (1999), 135--138.

Digital Library

[5]

Boehm, B. W. Software Engineering Economics. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1981.

Digital Library

[6]

Boehm, B. W. A spiral model of software development and enhancement. Computer 21, 5 (1988), 61--72.

Digital Library

[7]

Bryant, A., Catton, A., Volder, K. D., and Murphy, G. C. Explicit programming. In AOSD 2002 (New York, NY, USA, 2002), ACM, pp. 10--18.

Digital Library

[8]

Cacho, N., Sant'Anna, C., Figueiredo, E., Garcia, A., Batista, T., and Lucena, C. Composing design patterns: a scalability study of aspect-oriented programming. In 5th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (Bonn, Germany, 2006), ACM Press, pp. 109--121.

Digital Library

[9]

Chen, H., and Cheng, R. ZK: Ajax without the Javascript Framework. aPress, Aug. 2007.

Digital Library

[10]

Clarke, S., and Walker, R. J. Composition patterns: an approach to designing reusable aspects. In 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (Toronto, 2001), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 5--14.

Digital Library

[11]

Codehaus Opensource Software Community. The Castor project. http://www.castor.org/index.html.

[12]

Coward, D. Java Servlet Specification Version 2.4, 2004.

[13]

Cunha, C. A., Sobral, J. L., and Monteiro, M. P. Reusable aspect-oriented implementations of concurrency patterns and mechanisms. In 5th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (Bonn, Germany, 2006), ACM Press, pp. 134--145.

Digital Library

[14]

Czarnecki, K., and Eisenecker, U. Generative programming: methods, tools, and applications. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. New York, NY, USA, 2000.

Digital Library

[15]

Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse Java development tools. http://www.eclipse.org/jdt.

[16]

Egyed, A., and Balzer, R. Integrating cots software into systems through instrumentation and reasoning. Automated Software Engineering 13, 1 (2006), 41--64.

Digital Library

[17]

Forgy, C. Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Patterns/Many Objects Match Problem. Artificial Intelligence 19, 1 (1982), 17--37.

Digital Library

[18]

Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 1995.

Digital Library

[19]

Garrett, J. J. Ajax: A new approach to web applications, 2005. http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php.

[20]

Goth, G. XML: The Center of Attention Up and Down the Stack. Distributed Systems Online, IEEE 7, 1 (2006), 3--3.

Digital Library

[21]

Gray, J., and Roychoudhury, S. A technique for constructing aspect weavers using a program transformation engine. In AOSD '04: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development (New York, NY, USA, 2004), ACM Press, pp. 36--45.

Digital Library

[22]

Griswold, W. G. Just-in-time architecture: planning software in an uncertain world. In Joint proceedings of the second international software architecture workshop (ISAW-2) and international workshop on multiple perspectives in software development (Viewpoints '96) on SIGSOFT '96 workshops (New York, NY, USA, 1996), ACM Press, pp. 8--11.

Digital Library

[23]

Griswold, W. G., and Notkin, D. Automated assistance for program restructuring. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 2, 3 (1993), 228--269.

Digital Library

[24]

Hammouda, I. A tool infrastructure for model-driven development using aspectual patterns. Model-driven Software Development - Volume II of Research and Practice in Software Engineering (2005), 139--178.

[25]

Hannemann, J., and Kiczales, G. Design pattern implementation in Java and AspectJ. In 17th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (Seattle, Washington, 2002), ACM Press, pp. 161--173.

Digital Library

[26]

Heineman, G. T. Adaptation and software architecture. In 3rd International Workshop on Software Architecture (Orlando, Florida, 1998), ACM Press, pp. 61--64.

Digital Library

[27]

Henthorne, C., and Tilevich, E. Code generation on steroids: Enhancing COTS code generators via generative aspects. In Second International Workshop on Incorporating COTS Software into Software Systems: Tools and Techniques IWICS 2007 (2007).

Digital Library

[28]

Hürsch, W. L., and Seiter, L. M. Automating the evolution of object-oriented systems. In International Symposium on Object Technologies for Advanced Software (1996), Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 2--21.

Digital Library

[29]

Johnson, R. J2EE development frameworks. Computer 38, 1 (2005), 107--110.

Digital Library

[30]

Johnson, R. E., and Foote, B. Designing reusable classes. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming 1, 2 (1988), 22--35.

[31]

Kalleberg, K., and Visser, E. Combining Aspect Oriented and Strategic Programming. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 147 (2006), 5--30.

Digital Library

[32]

Kalleberg, K. T., and Visser, E. Fusing a transformation language with an open compiler. In Seventh Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools, and Applications (LDTA'07) (Braga, Portugal, March 2007), A. Sloane and A. Johnstone, Eds., pp. 18--31.

[33]

Kellens, A., Mens, K., Brichau, J., and Gybels, K. Managing the evolution of aspect-oriented software with modelbased pointcuts. In ECOOP 2006 Object-Oriented Programming (2006), vol. 4067, Springer Verlag, pp. 501--525.

Digital Library

[34]

Keller, R. Binary component adaptation. In 12th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (1998), Springer-Verlag, pp. 307--329.

Digital Library

[35]

Kemerer, C., and Slaughter, S. Determinants of software maintenance profiles: an empirical investigation. Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice 9, 4 (1997), 235--251.

Digital Library

[36]

Kiczales, G., Hilsdale, E., Hugunin, J., Kersten, M., Palm, J., and Griswold, W. G. An overview of AspectJ. In ECOOP (2001), Springer-Verlag.

Digital Library

[37]

Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Mendhekar, A., Maeda, C., Lopes, C., Loingtier, J. M., and Irwing, J. Aspect-oriented programming. In ECOOP (1997), Springer-Verlag.

[38]

Kniesel, G. Type-safe delegation for run-time component adaptation. In 13th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (1999), Springer-Verlag, pp. 351--366.

Digital Library

[39]

Lehman, M. M., and Belady, L. A., Eds. Program evolution: processes of software change. Academic Press Professional, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA, 1985.

Digital Library

[40]

LibX TEAM. LibX browser plugin for libraries. http://libx. org.

[41]

Lieberherr, K. J. Adaptive Object-Oriented Software: The Demeter Method with Propagation Patterns. PWS Publishing Company, Boston, 1996. ISBN 0-534-94602-X.

Digital Library

[42]

Lientz, B., and Swanson, E. Software Maintenance Management. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc. Boston, MA, USA, 1980.

Digital Library

[43]

McLaughlin, L. Automated programming: the next wave of developer power tools. Software, IEEE 23, 3 (2006), 91--93.

Digital Library

[44]

Morel, B., and Alexander, P. Automating component adaptation for reuse. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (2003), pp. 142--151.

Digital Library

[45]

Morel, B., and Alexander, P. Spartacas: Automating component reuse and adaptation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 30, 9 (2004), 587--600.

Digital Library

[46]

Morisio, M., Seaman, C. B., Parra, A. T., Basili, V. R., Kraft, S. E., and Condon, S. E. Investigating and improving a cots-based software development. In ICSE '00: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering (New York, NY, USA, 2000), ACM Press, pp. 32--41.

Digital Library

[47]

Notkin, D., and Griswold, W. G. Extension and software development. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering (Singapore, 1988), IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 274--283.

Digital Library

[48]

Oreizy, P., Medvidovic, N., and Taylor, R. Architecture-based runtime software evolution. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (1998), pp. 177--186.

Digital Library

[49]

Orleans, D., and Lieberherr, K. DJ: Dynamic Adaptive Programming in Java. In Reflection 2001: Meta-level Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns (2001), Springer.

Digital Library

[50]

Parnas, D. L. Designing software for ease of extension and contraction. In 3rd International Conference on Software Engineering (Atlanta, Georgia, 1978), IEEE Press, pp. 264--277.

Digital Library

[51]

Penix, J., and Alexander, P. Toward automated component adaptation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (1997), Knowledge Systems Institute, pp. 535--542.

[52]

Proctor, M., Neale, M., Lin, P., and Frandsen, M. Drools Documentation. Tech. rep., JBoss Inc., 2006.

[53]

Shonle, M., Griswold, W., and Lerner, S. Beyond refactoring: a framework for modular maintenance of crosscutting design idioms. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) (2007), ACM Press New York, NY, USA, pp. 175--184.

Digital Library

[54]

Simonyi, C. The Death of Computer Languages, the Birth of Intentional Programming. In NATO Science Committee Conference (1995).

[55]

Smaragdakis, Y., and Batory, D. Application generators. Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2000).

[56]

Soares, S., Borba, P., and Laureano, E. Distribution and Persistence as Aspects. Software: Practice&Experience 36, 6 (2006).

Digital Library

[57]

Sutter, H. The free lunch is over: A fundamental turn toward concurrency in software. Dr. Dobbs Journal 30, 3 (2005).

[58]

Tatsubori, M., Chiba, S., Killijian, M.-O., and Itano, K. OpenJava: A class-based macro system for Java. In Reflection and Software Engineering. Springer Verlag, 2000, pp. 117--133.

Digital Library

[59]

Wilde, N., Matthews, P., and Huitt, R. Maintaining objectoriented software. IEEE Software 10, 1 (1993), 75--80.

Digital Library

Cited By

Pan XBack GOssowski S(2016)Rich cloud-based web applications with CloudBrowser 2.0Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/2851613.2851859(758-765)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2851613.2851859
Bailey ABack G(2013)Streamlining Access to Library Resources with LibXRobots in Academic Libraries10.4018/978-1-4666-3938-6.ch004(62-89)Online publication date: 2013
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-3938-6.ch004
McDaniel BBack GLeavens G(2012)The CloudBrowser web application frameworkProceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Systems, programming, and applications: software for humanity10.1145/2384716.2384768(141-156)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2384716.2384768
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

"Program, enhance thyself!": demand-driven pattern-oriented program enhancement
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools

Recommendations

Modular language implementation in Rascal - experience report

All software evolves, and programming languages and programming language tools are no exception. And just like in ordinary software construction, modular implementations can help ease the process of changing a language implementation and its dependent ...
Expressive and safe static reflection with MorphJ
PLDI '08

Recently, language extensions have been proposed for Java and C# to support pattern-based reflective declaration. These extensions introduce a disciplined form of meta-programming and aspect-oriented programming to mainstream languages: They allow ...
Execution levels for aspect-oriented programming
AOSD '10: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development

In aspect-oriented programming languages, advice evaluation is usually considered as part of the base program evaluation. This is also the case for certain pointcuts, such as if pointcuts in AspectJ, or simply all pointcuts in higher-order aspect ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

AOSD '08: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development

March 2008

212 pages

ISBN:9781605580449

DOI:10.1145/1353482

Conference Chair:
Theo D'Hondt
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

AOSA: Aspect-Oriented Software Association

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 March 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

AOSD08

Sponsor:

AOSA

AOSD08: 7th Annual Aspect-Oriented Software Development Conference

March 31 - April 4, 2008

Brussels, Belgium

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 41 of 139 submissions, 29%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
431
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 30 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Pan XBack GOssowski S(2016)Rich cloud-based web applications with CloudBrowser 2.0Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/2851613.2851859(758-765)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2851613.2851859
Bailey ABack G(2013)Streamlining Access to Library Resources with LibXRobots in Academic Libraries10.4018/978-1-4666-3938-6.ch004(62-89)Online publication date: 2013
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-3938-6.ch004
McDaniel BBack GLeavens G(2012)The CloudBrowser web application frameworkProceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Systems, programming, and applications: software for humanity10.1145/2384716.2384768(141-156)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2384716.2384768
Shonle MGriswold WLerner S(2012)A framework for the checking and refactoring of crosscutting conceptsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/2211616.221161821:3(1-47)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2211616.2211618
Maxwell EBack GRamakrishnan NRao BKrishnapuram BTomkins AYang Q(2010)Diagnosing memory leaks using graph mining on heap dumpsProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining10.1145/1835804.1835822(115-124)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1835804.1835822
Shonle MGriswold WLerner SKrishnamurthi SYoung M(2008)Addressing common crosscutting problems with ArcumProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering10.1145/1512475.1512489(64-69)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1512475.1512489

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten