Relational Database Support for Aspect-Oriented Programming

Short Description
Oriented Programming (AOP) to separate crosscutting concerns - in AspectJ. (an aspect language for Java) using a relational database. The approach is based …

Website: www.comp.lancs.ac.uk | Filesize: 454kb

Content
Relational Database Support for
Aspect-Oriented Programming
Awais Rashid, Neil Loughran
Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK
awais@comp.lancs.ac.uk
loughran@comp.lancs.ac.uk
Abstract. Code repositories play a central role in the reuse and mining of
existing assets when engineering large, complex software systems. It is,
therefore, essential that database support be extended to new programming
paradigms as and when they emerge. This paper proposes an approach to
support the storage, reuse and mining of aspects - constructs used in Aspect-
Oriented Programming (AOP) to separate crosscutting concerns - in AspectJ
(an aspect language for Java) using a relational database. The approach is based
on mapping an aspect’s anatomy to the relational model hence allowing finegrained
queries to be composed. This results in greater flexibility during search
and retrieval in contrast with most existing code repositories which store the
code as BLObs complemented by meta-data about the code.
1 Introduction
The mining and reuse of existing assets is a core activity in the engineering of large,
complex software systems and a driving factor in the reduction of their costs and time
to market. Code repositories are at the nucleus of this…