[aspectj-dev] OOPSLA paper, and making AspectJ extensible

[Macneil Shonle <mshonle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Next week at OOPSLA I will be presenting my DDD-track paper on XAspects:
An Extensible System for Domain-Specific Aspect Languages:

  http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~mshonle/ddd04-shonle.pdf

The paper describes some problems when using multiple domain-specific
aspect languages, and then how these problems can be solved using the
XAspects model. This work is directly related to Jim Hugunin's paper "The
Next Steps For Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages (in Java)"
(http://www.hpcc.gov/iwg/sdp/vanderbilt/position_papers/jim_hugunin_the_next_steps_for_aspect.pdf),
and is layered directly on top of the AspectJ compiler.

I think it would be a great opportunity for AspectJ to take this
direction: The technique used by XAspects can be used by AspectJ in a way
that would not expose any of the inner workings of the compiler, while
introducing minimal new APIs.

I encourage you to check out my paper (and my talk if you're also in
Anaheim next week!) as a starting point on how to make AspectJ extensible.

Hope to see you there!
-Macneil

P.S. The paper contains a case study of converting the DemeterJ language
to this model, one of the motivating examples provided in Jim's position
paper.