Implementing Fault Tolerance Using Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) is a promising technique for implementing fault tolerance. Still there exist few actual implementations. One reason is that most present day AOP languages do not offer the level of control needed. This paper addresses the problem by defining a representative set of fault tolerance mechanisms. The set can be used for evaluating the feasibility of languages and for finding needs for improvements. It has been used to evaluate the AspectC++ language, and a number of limitations have been revealed. AspectC++ was then extended in order to address this. It is also demonstrated how reusable fault tolerance mechanisms can be built using aspect oriented C++, and the advantages compared to using standard C++ are discussed