Avoiding Infinite Recursion with Stratified Aspects

Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group
McGill University
3480 University Street
H3A 2A7 Montréal, Québec, Canada
bodden@acm.org

Florian Forster
LG Programmiersysteme
Fernuniversität in Hagen
Universitätsstraße 1
58097 Hagen, Germany
florian.forster@feu.de

Friedrich Steimann
LG Programmiersysteme
Fernuniversität in Hagen
Universitätsstraße 1
58097 Hagen, Germany
steimann@acm.org

Abstract: Infinite recursion is a known problem of aspect-oriented programming with AspectJ: if no special precautions are taken, aspects which advise other aspects can easily and unintentionally advise themselves. We present a compiler for an extension of the AspectJ programming language that avoids self reference by associating aspects with levels, and by automatically restricting the scope of pointcuts used by an aspect to join points of lower levels. We report on a case study using our language extension and quantify the changes necessary for migrating existing applications to it. Our results suggest that we can make programming with AspectJ simpler and safer, without restricting its expressive power unduly.

Paper

The paper can be downloaded here as PDF. It was presented at Net.ObjectDays 2006 and published in: GI-Edition Lecture Notes in Informatics 'NODe 2006 GSEM 2006', Robert Hirschfeld, Andreas Polze and Ryszard Kowalczyk (Editors), pp. 49-64

Downloads

The following downloads are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind.

Extended version of the AspectBench Compiler

Source code of the extension (tar/gz; extension only)
Precompiled binary (jar; full development version of abc including our extension)

Running the extended abc version

In order to run our modified version of abc, simply type:

java -jar abc-meta-1.0.0.jar <standard abc arguments>

You can get help on the command line arguments by typing

java -jar abc-meta-1.0.0.jar -help

In order to run the original version of abc, type:

java -jar abc-meta-1.0.0.jar -ext abc.main <standard abc arguments>

We provide three tests we used for unit testing for you in order to get a feeling for how the new language behaves. You can run them by typing:

java -jar abc-meta-1.0.0.jar <file name>

MatcherTest.java demonstrates what pointcuts match what joinpoints (output)
TypeCheckerTest.java demonstrates what meta pointcuts are allowed in what meta aspects (output)
TypeCheckerInheritanceTest.java demonstrates what aspects may extend what other aspects (output)

In addition we provide original and refactored versions of our benchmark programs below.

Extending the extended abc version

In order to extend our version of abc (as described for J-LO in the paper), simply extend abc.meta instead of abc.aspectj in your abc extension. Our modified J-LO version can be downloaded here (tar/gz) as an example.

Benchmarks

Each of the ZIP files contains a file metachanges.txt which comments on the necessary changes when applying the stratified aspects extension.

Avoiding Infinite Recursion with Stratified Aspects

Paper

Downloads

Extended version of the AspectBench Compiler

Running the extended abc version

Extending the extended abc version

Benchmarks

Law of Demeter Checker

Version of section 4.1

Version of section 4.2

Version of section 4.3

Glassbox Inspector

Tracing from the AspectJ distribution

Tetris

Banking application