Research And Implementation Of Description Of AOP's Pointcuts Based On XML

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new programming methodology, which aims to solve code scattering and tangling problems existing in traditional object oriented programming methodology when modeling crosscuting concerns. AOP makes programs better modularized, better maintainable, extensible and flexible. In recent years, AOP is becoming more and more popular and well known, AOP languages become more mature as well. Most current AOP tools use the Join Point Model (JPM) as the key mechanism to describe the relationships between aspects and classes, but for describing pointcuts, all of them use plain text, which actually causes problems in the development and maintenance phases.To deal with this problem, we propose a novel pointcut description mechanism called XML Aspect Pointcut Description Language (XAPDL). XAPDL uses XML to describle the details of pointcut and the relationship between crosscutiong concern and primary concern, which completely separates them. The reference language in the article is a subset language of AspectJ, called MiniAspectJ, which keeps the core features of AOP while excluding some advanced features. The reason of simplification is for the convenience of research and future verification work. Based on the XAPDL theory, we design and implement an tool named XAJDT to support XAPDL development, which includes an XAPDL editor and an XAPDL to MiniAspectJ translator. In the article we verify the correctness of XAPDL by exhaustively running all possible combination of XAPDL.The paper is the first research on how to describle the details of pointcut in formal method instead of plain text, and put up a detailed solution----XAPDL. By using XAPDL and XAJDT, programmers can more effectively develop and maintain AOP languages in real programming environment and the performance of XAJDT is quite optimistic.