Adapting aspect-oriented applications: a trial experience

Abstract

During a system’s life cycle, new requirements or changes in the existing ones imply modifying the system. Aspect-oriented software development is a new approach to the modularization of systems, yet it does not provide mechanisms to aid the evolution of software. The effort required to support the evolution greatly depends on the tool used for its construction. For this reason, the selection of a tool should also take into account its support for implementing evolving requirements. In this paper we present a comparison of two different tools, AspectJ and Alpheus, to support the construction and evolution of aspect-oriented applications. AspectJ is an aspect-oriented programming language based on Java. Alpheus is an aspect-oriented development tool based on a reflective framework.