Controlling the Scope of Aspects

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Éric Tanter

DATE: Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30

ABSTRACT:
One of the main challenges for AOP is to properly specify how aspects are composed with other modules. Pointcuts offer means to select appropriate execution events, called join points. However, the dominant assumption in typical languages like AspectJ is that pointcuts are matched against the whole execution of a program.
This yields to overly complex and fragile pointcuts. In this talk, we will discuss two related proposals for more expressive control of the scope of aspects. First, we will expose scoping strategies, a mechanism for fine-grained scoping (first presented at AOSD.08), along with some applications (to distribution, AOSD.09; and to access control, article under review). We will then move on to the second proposal, to be presented at AOSD.10: execution levels. Execution levels give structure to the execution of a program, and allow aspects to stand at and affect specific levels. Execution levels are particularly interesting to avoid issues of infinite regression of aspectual computation.

BIO:
Éric Tanter is assistant professor at the University of Chile, where he leads the PLEIAD laboratory of the Computer Science Department.
His research focuses on programming paradigms and languages for adaptable systems. This includes studying how language mechanisms, computational reflection, program transformation, and aspect-oriented programming can be leveraged to enhance the development of concurrent and distributed systems and tackle context awareness and adaptation.

HOST: Prof. Walter Binder