Industry Track

Welcome to the industry track of AOSD 2008.

We are pleased to present a two day program that includes several interesting experience reports on the application of AOSD technologies in industry projects. You may expect good news as well as criticism.

You will definitely notice that the program also covers, apart from the relatively popular technologies such as AspectJ, the application of AOSD in other, sometimes even legacy programming languages. Furthermore, middleware solutions are represented as well. The result appears to be a healthy mix of topics.

In a closing panel on Thursday, the business value of AOSD for industry will be discussed. This session may highlight some key research topics.

Enjoy AOSD 2008!

SAP is the world's largest vendor of enterprise software. SAP Research is interested in understanding, evaluating, and applying aspect-oriented techniques in the context of large enterprise systems. This interest is also reected by our involvement several European and national research projectson Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD). We reporton existing aspect-oriented concepts at SAP and presenta case study that illustrates several non-obvious crosscutting concerns in business software. We also discuss the benefits and challenges that arise when applying AOSD to large scale industrial projects and present a road map to adopting AOSD at SAP for productive use.

This paper presents some interesting experiences solving typical crosscutting concerns with AspectJ. In spite of handling obvious candidates such as persistence, some language deficits – not only of AspectJ - have been detected. The problems have a high potential to recur in other contexts as well and are partially hard to overcome.

All the crosscutting concerns are well motivated and the problems are discussed in detail.

AOP, SOA and Agile process address different aspects of the challenges of building flexible business application and they complement each other. We successfully applied the three techniques together to build a flexible life insurance underwriting framework, which can be easily customized and implemented in different enterprises. In this paper we share our experience of using AOP with SOA and Scrum agile process. We have explained the reason behind using AOP, how it aided the agile development process, the synergy that we have noticed between SOA and AOP and the experience of the team in using AOP.

Software product line engineering aims to reduce development time, effort, cost and complexity by taking advantage of the commonality within a portfolio of similar products. The effectiveness of a software product line approach directly depends on how well feature variability within the portfolio is managed throughout the development lifecycle, from early analysis through maintenance and evolution. Variability of features in a product line often has widespread impact, crosscutting not only multiple parts of individual artifacts but also multiple artifacts in multiple stages of the development lifecycle. This paper presents a tool-based approach for managing crosscutting feature variability in software product lines using aspect-oriented principles. The approach makes it possible to handle multi-artifact crosscutting. For code artifacts is is even independent of the languages used for feature implementation. We report on experiences made in industrial settings, including 2006 Software Product Line Hall of Fame inductee, LSI Logic’s Engenio Storage Group.

The Ventouris project is one of the largest Java EE projects in the Benelux. Cegeka develops the project for eight social insurance funds, with a total budget of more than 26,000 persondays and a team of 60 people.

The project is split up into several modules, implemented by several teams of approximately 10 persons each, following a mixed Scrum and XP approach. During the development process, the agile teams seek to continuously improve themselves, and gradually migrated from a heavyweight, EJB based, architecture to a lighter weight architecture based on Plain Old Java Objects (POJO’s), Spring Framework and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP).

In this paper, we will show how AOP helps to improve the Object-Oriented (OO) design of a large Java EE application. We will show how AOP helps to separate crosscutting infrastructure concerns, like transaction management and auditing, from the actual business logic. Finally, we will demonstrate how AOP enables Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles in a large codebase.

The key question facing any organisation interested in adopting AOSD techniques is whether they work in non-trivial industrial contexts and if they can provide the perceived modularity benefits that would yield productivity and quality gains.

AOSD-Europe is a large-scale academia-industry collaboration funded by the EC FP6 programme that has been exploring these questions as part of its activities over the last 4 years.

In this talk I will reflect on these experiences both in medium to large scale industrial projects as well as empirical studies conducted in controlled environments. These experiences highlight the value of AOSD in delivering improved software quality in non-trivial contexts. They also reveal adoption barriers such as inertia to a new technology in an already over-loaded space and the need for modular testing techniques to improve the confidence-level in the deployability of AOSD mechanisms. I will conclude the talk by discussing some non-conventional contexts in which AOSD is being applied namely, analysis of historical religious texts and protection of children against paedophilia in online social networks.

This talk will show how the core of the JBoss Application Server version 5 is integrated with JBoss AOP. The JBoss Application Server is one of the leading Java application servers on the market. It is open-source and free to use. It has used a microkernel as its core for a long time, which has allowed it to quickly integrate new technologies into the stack offered by the application server. The core of the JBoss Application Server version 5 contains JBoss AOP embedded in the microcontainer. The power of AOP in combination with the management capabilities of the microcontainer provides the framework where all JBoss AS 5 services, like transactionsm security, etc. will be deployed as beans.

We present PostSharp Laos, an open-source static aspect weaver for the .NET platform designed with simplicity in mind. An original contribution of PostSharp Laos to aspectoriented programming are imperative compile-time semantics of aspects, thanks to which aspects can define methods that are invoked at compile time. Compile-time imperative semantics help in solving complex problems without the burden of a complex declarative syntax. We give some examples of usage for compiletime imperative semantics in PostSharp Laos: aspect validation; aspect initialization; and complex pointcutting.

In the second part of the article, we present other features of PostSharp Laos and sketch its architecture: PostSharp Laos is implemented as a plug-in of PostSharp Core, a generic platform for post-processing of .NET assemblies. New weavers targeting the .NET framework may be developed on the top of this platform, which would relieve weaver developers from typical infrastructure concerns of assembly post-processing applications.

Aquarium is an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) toolkit for the Ruby language. It leverages the powerful metaprogramming facilities of the language to provide convenient abstractions for implementing aspects. Even for languages with good metaprogramming facilities, e.g., most dynamically typed languages, where it is possible to mimic AOP with the metaprogramming API itself, the ability to design and implement software using the same aspect idioms improves productivity and quality, just as it does for statically typed languages like Java. This paper demonstrates this advantage with example refactorings, using Aquarium, of the well-known Ruby on Rails web framework.

Aquarium is designed with several goals in mind: (i) to demonstrate the value of AOP facilities in languages with strong metaprogramming facilities, (ii) to provide a powerful, yet intuitive pointcut language, (iii) to support extensive runtime flexibility, such as the ability to advise individual objects and to add and remove aspects dynamically, and (iv) to facilitate the implementation of powerful Domain-Specific Languages.

In this paper, we elaborate on the design of an industrial-strenght aspect-oriented programming language and weaver for large-scale software development. First, we present an analysis on the requirements of a general purpose aspect-oriented language that can handle crosscutting concerns in ASML software. We also outline a strategy on working with aspects in large-scale software development processes. In our design, we both re-use existing aspectoriented language abstractions and propose new ones to address the issues that we identified in our analysis. The quality of the code ensured by the realized language and weaver has positive impact both on maintenance effort and lead-time reduction in the first line software development process. As evidence, we present a short evaluation of the language and weaver as applied today in the software development process of ASML.

Cobol is still a vitally important language for mission-critical enterprise systems, and so much effort is being spent on system development projects involving Cobol applications. In order to ease these tasks with the Aspect-Oriented Programming technology, we have developed a version of Aspect-Oriented Cobol, which constitutes the core of a system enhancement service being offered for real-world customers.

We report on ALCOB, our aspect-description language, and its weaving semantics. We have also implemented an industrystrength weaver for ALCOB. We describe the business rationales in our endeavour which gave rise to a set of clear design principles.