Handling Replica Management Concerns by Means of Aspects

In order to balance the load of grid resources, often applications deployed on the grid environment need to determine and take decisions on the basis of the dynamic state of these resources. This knowledge makes application run smoothly, however it also makes applications more complex. In this paper we propose to use aspect-orientation to handle concerns related with the state of resources on a grid, i.e. hosts holding files. Aspects are used to redirect selected invocations to grid middleware Globus and execute additional code that determines the most appropriate hosts to be accessed. Needed aspects are generated for the application at hand and according to the desired feature given as a configuration file.