Aspect-oriented system structure

Date

2001

Authors

Coady, Y
Kiczales, G
Feeley, M
Hutchinson, N
Ong, JS
Gudmundson, S

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE

Abstract

Operating system structure is important; it leads to understandable, maintainable, 'pluggable' code. But despite our best efforts, some system elements have been difficult to structure. We propose a new analysis of this problem, and a new technology that can structure these elements. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) (G. Kiczales et al., 1997) uses linguistic mechanisms to support the separation of crosscutting elements, or aspects of the system, from primary functionality. We have developed a proof-of-concept AOP implementation of prefetching in FreeBSD (www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/spl/aspects/aspectc.html). In our implementation, we have been able to modularize prefetching.

Description

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Keywords

AOP, aspect-oriented programming, aspect-oriented system structure, cross-cutting elements, cross-cutting elements, FreeBSD, linguistic mechanisms, modularized prefetching, operating system structure, operating systems (computers)

Citation

Coady, Y.; Kiczales, G.; Feeley, M.; Hutchinson, N.; Ong, J. S. ; Gudmundson, S.., Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2001. Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on