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[aspectj-users] On aspects inheritance
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Hi all,
We are two graduate students at Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
We are involved in an investigation related to AOP for one of our courses,
and we are currently analyzing AspectJ but we got stuck reasoning about
extending aspects.
Our problem is related to how this capability of AspectJ can be considered.
We found that one can extend an abstract aspect, but not a concrete one. In
particular, I can extend an abstract aspect with another (abstract) aspect,
adding some new members (advices, pointcuts) and overriding the existing
pointcuts. We were asking urselves how this language feature can be related
to classic object oriented class inheritance. That is, if in OOP the
substitutability principle holds, is it still valid in AOP? Can we speak
about some kind of "aspect inheritance"?
Our first conclusion is that aspect extension has been provided just to
allow some kind of code reusability: that is one should write the behavioral
part of the aspect only once, and subsequently "bind" it to a specific
program providing the concrete specification of the abstract pointcuts. This
is justified by the fact that concrete aspects cannot be extended.
With respect to this, we were also wondering on how AspectJ has been
designed without giving the programmer the ability to extend a concrete
aspect. Is that just because the language does not provide runtime weaving
capabilities by design, thus forcing the programmer to choose the aspects to
be applied to the program only at compile (or load) time? We think that this
could be some kind of correct reason...
We posted this reasoning in the hope that someone can help us to clarify our
uncertainties about the most theoretical points on how AspectJ was designed
and why :)
Thanks in advance
Francesco and Matteo
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