JOIN POINT DESIGNATION DIAGRAMS: A GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF JOIN POINT SELECTIONS
Dominik Stein, Stefan Hanenberg, Rainer Unland · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2006
The specification of join point selections (also known as "pointcuts") is a major design issue in Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Aspect-oriented systems generally provide specific language constructs (subsumed by the term "pointcut language") for specifying such a join point selection. Pointcut languages differ widely with respect to their syntax and semantics. Consequently, developers familiar with one specific language can hardly benefit from this knowledge when designing and implementing pointcuts in another language. This implies that developers working with different aspect-oriented languages can hardly communicate their design to each other, and knowledge about aspect-oriented design can hardly be transferred among developers developing in different languages. In order to overcome this problem, we present novel specification means based on the UML to represent diverse ways of join point selections — without relying on language-specific syntax and semantics. Instead, the proposed language constructs are able to express join point selections in a variety of different aspect-oriented programming languages.