muAOP - an AspectJ extension for mobile computing

While developing distributed applications for mobile computing, software engineers face challenges related to the mobility concern in addition to the mobile unit´s basic functionalities and other supplementary concerns during their design and implementation phases. As the development´s complexity increases, the code mobility related concern cannot be modularized based only on object-oriented abstractions. The mobility related concern tends to spread across several system components, which in turn makes the further development more difficult to maintain and reuse. This paper proposes an adaptive and aspect-oriented framework, called the muAOP framework, with improved modularization for code mobility related concerns and a more flexible mechanism for distributed computing. By using the AOP paradigm, code mobility can be introduced transparently without mixing with core application domains. The idea and implementation of the muAOP approach are described, and experimental simulation results demonstrate that, as compared to those results yielded by the traditional approach, our novel muAOP approach can synthetically enhance the system modularity in general at a relatively low cost.