DAW: Dynamic Aspects Workshop

URL	http://aosd.net/2004/workshops/daw/
Contact Email	rfilman@mail.arc.nasa.gov
Date	Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Organizers	Robert Filman, RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center Michael Haupt, Darmstadt University of Technology Katharina Mehner, University of Paderborn Mira Mezini, Darmstadt University of Technology

Join points are the locus of aspect and functional code interaction. Traditional aspect systems define join points in terms of the static structure of programs. Method wrappers, before and after method calls, variable setting and retrieving, and structural identification of object fields are all examples of traditional joint points.

Beginning with the "Jumping Aspects" paper of Brichau et al., examples began to emerge in which it was desirable to invoke or change aspect behavior based on the dynamics of program execution. Such situations include changing behavior based on the call-stack context, co-occurrence of predicate triggers, concurrent thread status, or events in the underlying interpreter such as storage reclamation or process scheduling. The "cflow" construct in AspectJ was one response to the need for dynamic aspects.

This workshop will seek to identify examples of useful dynamic aspect behavior, suggest appropriate linguistic structures for dynamic aspects, and discuss implementation techniques for dynamic aspects, such as shadow compilation and modifications required in the underlying execution environment. The workshop organizers are particularly interested in position papers that describe experience with dynamic aspect systems or that outline real problems that need dynamic aspects.