Static and Dynamic Detection of Behavioral Conflicts between Aspects

Aspects have been successfully promoted as a means to improve the modularization of software in the presence of crosscutting concerns.\ud The so-called aspect interference problem is considered to be one of the remaining challenges of aspect-oriented software development: aspects may interfere with the behavior of the base code or other aspects.\ud Especially interference between aspects is difficult to prevent, as this may be caused solely by the composition of aspects that behave correctly in isolation. A typical situation where this may occur is when multiple advices are applied at the same, or shared, join point.\ud \ud In [1] we explained the problem of behavioral conflicts between aspects at shared join points. We presented an approach for the detection of behavioral conflicts that is based on a novel abstraction model for representing the behavior of advice. This model allows the expression of both primitive and complex behavior in a simple manner that is suitable for automated conflict detection. The presented approach employs a set of conflict detection rules, which can be used to detect both generic conflicts, as well as, domain- or application specific conflicts.\ud \ud The application of the approach to Compose*, which is an implementation of Composition Filters, demonstrates how the use of a declarative advice language can be exploited for aiding automated conflict detection.\ud This paper presents the need for and a possible approach to a runtime extension to the described static approach. The approach uses the declarative language of Composition Fillers. This allows us to reason efficiently about the behavior of aspects. It also enables us to detect these conflicts with minimal overhead at runtime