Adding Distribution to Existing Applications by means of Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new programming paradigm that offers a novel modularization unit for the crosscutting concerns. Functionalities originally spread across several modules and tangled with each other can be factored out into a single, separate unit, called an aspect. The source code fragments introduced to port an existing application to a distributed environment (such as Java RMI) are typically scattered and tangled, thus representing an ideal candidate for the usage of aspects. In this paper, we propose a distribution framework based on AOP and we describe the steps necessary to migrate an existing program to it. In our solution, the original application remains oblivious of the distribution concern and all required aspects are generated automatically. The approach was validated on a case stud