AOSD 2007 Conference

Dean Wampler — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:41:00 -0500

Last week, I attended the Aspect-Oriented Software Development 2007 Conference in Vancouver, BC, where I gave a tutorial on aspect-oriented design and a paper in the Industry Track, also about design.

AOSD and this particular conference are still mostly academic projects with some notable industry traction, especially in the Java world. It is also a technology that needs to break through to the next level of innovation and applicability, in my opinion.

The Industry Track had a number of interesting papers, including, for example, a paper that describes how aspects are used in the innovative Terracotta JVM clustering tool. Also, the last keynote by Adrian Colyer of Interface 21 recounted his personal involvement in the AspectJ and Spring communities, as well as the impact that aspects are having at major Interface 21 clients. It’s worth noting that many of the important Java middleware systems, e.g., Spring, JBoss, and Weblogic have embraced aspects to one degree or another.

AOSD tools like AspectJ and Spring AOP (AO Programming) solve obvious “cross-cutting concerns” (CCCs) like object-relational mapping, transactions, security, etc. in Java. However, I feel that AOSD needs some breakthrough innovations to move beyond its current role as a useful niche technology to a more central role in the software development process. I get the impression that industry interest in AOP has reached a plateau.

The academic community is doing some interesting work on fundamentals of AOSD theory (type theory, modeling, categorizing types of aspects, etc.), on “early aspects” (e.g., cross-cutting requirements), and on tooling. There is also a lot of minor iterating around the edges, but that’s the nature of academic research (speaking as one who has been there…). Most of the research work is a long ways from practical applicability.

However, I’m seeing too much emphasis on extending the work of AspectJ-like approaches in statically-typed languages, rather than innovating in new areas like new applications of aspects and the nature of AOSD in dynamic languages.

My recent work with Ruby has made me think about these two topics lately. I’ll blog about these topics later, but for now, I’ll just say that I anticipate a fruitful growth area for AOSD will be to facilitate the implementation of powerful DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), a popular topic in the Ruby community.

Here are some other observations from the conference.

All other engineering disciplines recognize cross-cutting concerns

Gregor Kiczales (the father of AspectJ and one of the fathers of AOSD) made this remark in a panel discussion on “early aspects”. He cited the examples of electrical engineers considering systemic issues in circuit design, like capacitance, current leakage, etc. and mechanical engineers who evaluate the stresses and strains of the entire structure they are designing (buildings, brake assemblies in cars, etc.).

Gregor also remarked that CCCs that are evident in the requirements may disappear in the implementation and vice-versa.

Gerald Sussman keynote

In the first keynote, Gerald Sussman argued that robust systems are adaptable for uses that were not anticipated by their designers. These systems often have multiple organizational ideas and a “component” structure that promotes “combinatorial behavior”.

He doesn’t like formalisms such as Dykstra’s A Discipline of Programming. Provable correctness and rigor aren’t very compatible with rich programs. Sussman prefers a more “exploratory” model, very much analogous to Test Driven Development (TDD), and what he calls Paranoid Programming, which he defined as “I won’t be at fault if it fails.”

More on AOSD

I will blog further about aspect-oriented design and aspects in dynamic languages.

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