Effective Aspects: A Typed Monadic Embedding of Pointcuts and Advice

This is the main page for our research on pointcut/advice model of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) in monadic setting. We have developed a Haskell AOP library that provides the full pointcut/advice model of AOP into a monadic setting. Read below for further details.

See our follow-up work: Compositional Reasoning About Aspect Interference

Code for our Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development Submission

Thesis Reviewers: this source code also corresponds to the manuscript

The code for our TAOSD submission can be downloaded here

A Typed Monadic Embedding of Aspects (AOSD 2013)

We developed a novel approach to embed pointcut/advice aspects in a typed functional programming language like Haskell. Aspects are first-class, can be deployed dynamically, and the pointcut language is extensible. Type soundness is guaranteed by exploiting the underlying type system, in particular phantom types and a new anti-unification type class. The use of monads brings type-based reasoning about effects for the first time in the pointcut/advice setting, and makes it possible to modularly extend or modify the aspect language.

Source Code

Original code from AOSD 2013

The original source of the AOSD 2013 paper can be downloaded  here. See the included README file for details.

Taming Aspects with Monads and Membranes (FOAL 2013)

The source of our FOAL 2013 submission can be downloaded here. This is an updated revision of the previous code with programmable membranes semantics for aspect-oriented programming. See the included README and README-FOAL file for details.

About the Code

We tested the software in the Haskell Platform version 2012.2.0.0. Consequently, we used the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, GHC, with the following extensions.

The code depends on the following packages:

  • random
  • mtl
  • HUnit
  • QuickCheck
  • containers
  • haskell-src-meta
  • template-haskell
  • polytypeable
  • ghc-prim
  • fgl (functional graph library, for the membrane semantics)

Which can be installed using the cabal package manager included with the Haskell Platform.

We include the paper examples, and tests used during development. The main difference between the code in the paper and the source code are:

  • deployment/undeployment: we define the AOPMonad class with the deploy/undeploy top-level operations. These functions use the underlying deployInEnv / undeployInEnv functions defined by type class MonadDeploy.
  • In file Function.hs we define tagged functions to provide a more robust notion of function equality. Join points, open function application, and weaving are modified to accept this new kind of functions.