An Object-Oriented Framework for Aspect-Oriented Languages

Aspect-orientation is a mechanism for modularizing cross-cutting concerns that has been added to many existing soft-ware engineering languages. The implementations of aspect-oriented language extensions, however, are typically tied to a specific base language. There is little or no code reuse between aspect-oriented extensions for different base lan-guages, which makes these extensions difficult and expen-sive to build. In addition, existing software engineering tools do not work with the resulting aspect-oriented languages un-less new plugins are developed. We present Carpenter, an object-oriented framework for developing aspect-oriented language extensions. An aspect language is developed by reusing classes for generic lan-guage constructs from Carpenter, and writing subclasses of the abstractions in Carpenter to define new language con-structs. An aspect weaver is created by implementing frame-work interfaces to weave language-specific constructs. The coordination of the weaving process is done by the Carpen-ter framework. Aspect languages developed with Carpenter get full IDE support with only a few lines of code. We have used our framework to create aspect weavers for Java, JLo, and AspectU