An AspectJ Approach for Reusable Infrastructure Components

Aspect-orientation handles crosscutting concerns in an adequate manner. It also promises a high potential for reuse due to a higher level of modularization since crosscutting concerns can better be modularized in aspects. This paper confirms higher reuse by presenting an AspectJ-based reuse approach. A collection of reusable aspects, e.g., for issues in concurrent programming, is presented. Moreover, an adequate Eclipse-based infrastructure is proposed that allows programmers to use those aspects easily within Eclipse. In particular, manual actions for configuration, management of dependencies, and weaving are eliminated. Using an Eclipse plug-in, aspects can simply be selected from an aspect repository, a corresponding JAR is downloaded from the repository, included and woven into the project.