Explicitly distributed AOP using AWED †

Distribution-related concerns, such as data replication, of-ten crosscut the business code of a distributed application. Currently such crosscutting concerns are frequently realized on top of distributed frameworks, such as EJBs, and initial AO support for the modularization of such crosscutting con-cerns, e.g., JBoss AOP and Spring AOP, has been proposed. Based on an investigation of the implementation of repli-cated caches using JBoss Cache, we motivate that crosscut-ting concerns of distributed applications benefit from an as-pect language for explicit distributed programming. We pro-pose AWED, a new aspect language with explicit distributed programming mechanisms, which provides three contribu-tions. First, remote pointcut constructors which are more general than those of previous related approaches, in par-ticular, supporting remote sequences. Second, a notion of distributed advice with support for asynchronous and syn-chronous execution. Third, a notion of distributed aspects including models for the deployment, instantiation and state sharing of aspects. We show several concrete examples how AWED can be used to modularly implement and extend replicated cache implementations. Finally, we present a pro-totype implementation of AWED, which we have realized by extending JAsCo, a system providing dynamic aspects for Java