Improving reuse and maintainability of communication software with conversation-aware aspects

Implementing crosscutting concerns for message-based inter-process communications (IPC) is difficult, even using Aspect-oriented Programming Languages (AOPL) such as AspectJ. Many of these challenges are because the context of communication-related crosscutting concerns is often a conversation consisting of message sends and receives. Current AOPL do not provide pointcuts for weaving of advice into high-level IPC abstractions, like conversations. Other challenges stem from the wide variety of IPC mechanisms, their inherent characteristics, and the many ways in which they can be implemented, even using a common communication framework. This dissertation describes an extension to AspectJ, called CommJ, with which developers can implement communication-related concerns in cohesive and loosely coupled aspects. It also presents preliminary, but encouraging results from a subsequent study that shows seven different ways in which CommJ can improve the reusability and maintainability of applications requiring network communications.