SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

Checking Contracts for AOP using XPIDRs
Henrique Rebêlo, Ricardo Lima, Alexandre Mota, César Oliveria, and Márcio Ribeiro
Federal University of Pernambuco
Brazil
{hemr,rmfl,acm,calo,mmr3}@cin.ufpe.br
ABSTRACT
Over the last years, several proposals have advocated that a notion of interface between the base code and aspect code is
necessary for reasoning about aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and for overcoming pointcut fragility. However, existing
work that are AOP based, have not shown how one can specify these interfaces to facilitate m odular reasoning and specify
control effects, such when advice does not proceed.
In this dem onstration, we show how our crosscut program ming interfaces with design rules, or XPIDRs allow m odular
understanding and enforcement of control flow effects. The key idea behind our design methodology is to introduce a design
phase for each crosscutting concern. Hence, a designer establishes a crosscutting de sign rule interface to decouple the base
and the aspect design. Such a crosscutting design rule is based on the well-known crosscut programming interfaces (XPIs).
The main difference is that we present XPIs with the notion of behavioral rules. W e also show that since our approach with
XPIDRs do not require any new AOP construct; they can be adopted in a straightforward manner by the AOP community.
Demonstration Overview
This demonstration showcases the features and benefits of the XPIDRs through the figure editor system , which is the
classical example used in several AOP papers. The current infrastructure for developing XPIDRs is also demonstrated. It
requires the AJDT developm ent toolkit used by the Eclipse ID E. Hence, features like weavi ng and syntax highlighting are
straightforward. In addition, there is an XPIDR library required to specify the design rul es of the base and aspect code. This
library includes all the JML annotations along with specific ones used to specify the control flow effects of the program.
Presenter Biography
Henrique Rebêlo is one of the authors of the XPIDRs. He has extensive experience in separation of concerns and design by
contract techniques. He co-develope d the aspect-oriented JML com piler known as ajm lc. This com piler uses AOP for
enforcing JML contracts at runtime. He was a researcher in tern in 2010 at Microsoft Research working on program analysis
and program verification. He has given talks on design by contract and AOP at prestigious venues like SEKE’11, FTFJP’11,
SAVCBS’09, ICST’08, and SAC’08.
Acknowledgments
This work has been partially supported by FACEPE under grant No. IBPG-1664-1.03/08 for Henrique Rebêlo. Ricardo Lima
is also supported by CNPq under grant No. 314539/2009-3.
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