Towards More Robust Advice: Message Flow Analysis for Composition Filters and its Application
A.J. de Roo · 2007
Aspect oriented programming improves the quality of software by allowing a better separation of concerns. Composition filters is a delegation based AOP approach. It introduces advice by filtering messages sent between objects. The declarative syntax of composition filters opens possibilities for powerful reasoning about the behavior of a set of filters. This reasoning includes control flow analysis. But control flow analysis is only the basis of a much more powerful reasoning technique, called message flow analysis. Message flow analysis reasons about the behavior of a filter set for a specific message. It is a combination of control flow analysis and data flow analysis on the message entity. Message flow analysis brings opportunities for powerful conflict detection techniques,analyzing concern signature modifications, inlining of a set of filters and more. This thesis presents a new approach to message flow analysis, called the message flow simulation approach. This new approach improves upon existing approaches, like the message-action tree approach, by providing better granularity, traceability and efficiency.