Pragmatic Programmer Issues – pietrowski.info

We started with Keynote by John A. Stankovic from Universtity of Virginia, it was really cool keynote. He talk about defense system  The dynamics aspects where use to implement mechanism “right defense at the right time”. He describe real life problems with messages encryption, power management and sensor localization. The localization problem comes from that GPS do works only on open space. Thanks to aspects they provide sensor communication protocol. Also power management was treated as crosscutting issue and John describe protocols they develop for this propose. The final John thought is : “Flexibility offered by Dynamic AOP has great potential”.
I went to demo sessions, there was two demos, the first one is out of my interests, the second was quite interesting and open my eyes. I thought that JDK classes and aspect are not woven because of security reasons (this is what AspectJ team claims). Now I know that this issue is due to bootstrap classloader. It makes impossible to wave aspect to for example String class. The demo was about the tool which can do it. There are tools for that purpose called MAJOR and CARAJillo, one limitation of this tools is that JVM classes can only be woven statically. Great stuff.

Industry Panel was about “Challenges and Roadmap for Using AOSD in Industry”. The panel was rather boring. It was very slow and some trash talking: “it not easy to adopt new things to industry”, “risk management”, “academic solution doesn’t scale”, “no trust for aspect”,  “company policies ” and so on. Finally one of the panelist said that “Why we should use aspects if OOP currently works well”.There was few examples of industry usage from Accenture and Siemens.

Another demo session, two quite nice demos. First Lavash quite interesting probably not so aspect oriented framework of tools to automatic requirements processing. The second is in early stage and was about suggestion pointcut modification as we write new code. This may be very interesting tool in the future to keep programmers from silly mistakes. I will keep eye on it.

Industry session was more likely as panel. One good tough was that academic researcher should provide tools to make aspects fully testable. There was another aspect language proposal called “e” which mainly differs from AspectJ that AspectJ is focus on classes and “e” language on units. The session was improved by Uwe Hohenstein from Siemes. Uwe shows real project usage of aspects. Despite obvious examples such as connection pool monitoring,  performance monitoring. Siemens use aspect to address challenges of integrating 3rd party software in a maintainable manner keeping 3rd party software untouched. Most of the examples comes from Siemens Soarian project.

The last day came so quickly. AOSD is high level rather academic conference, but we should learn from the best.

This year I choose as my conference 8th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development it is rather no commercial conference, and now I know it’s for sure not commercial, probably I’m only one from industry, other fellows are from Universities and so on. It is amazing experience.

First the trip from New York to Charlottesville, was quite interesting, when I will be back home I will publish this trip. Then the first day, it was a lot of good talk, from time to time there was hard time (e.g. type systems), next we have discussion about Aspect Oriented adoption in industry. From this discussion I’ve got some great ideas to realize, we’ll see.

The first day I mainly participated in Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages workshop, probably the closest to my interests was Mohamed ElBendary from University of Wisconsin Milwaukee paper presentation.  The most impressive person from my point of view was Mehmet Akşit from University of Twente. It gives quite nice talk about history of programming, and he has so many papers that I will spend another year to try to read them all. We’ve finished with Open session leaded by Shmuel Katz from Technion–Israel Institute of Technology.

The second day I had hard choose between Workshop on Early Aspects and 4th Domain-Specific Aspect Languages Workshop and finally I choose Early Aspects because it was more difficult so another workshop I will have occasion to read by myself.  I was right, it was hard, probably due to fact that I rather far from modeling and aspect there is some kind of magic for me.

So BPM with Aspect, Dependencies Graph and so on was hard. On the rescue  Mehmet comes with real application example for the Netherlands government. It was about traffic system, and Mehmet tells about it in details. It was worth to here this talk as we can teach from that that we should find crosscutting concerns on early stages of software development process, otherwise we don’t use the power of aspects.
And finally my time comes, Birds of a Feather with JBoss AOP. It was very good speech made by Kabir Khan
and Flavia Rainone from JBoss. They talk about details of JBoss AOP, about new features, plans and problems with new Microkernel based on OSGi. Currently JBoss AOP is the most advanced AOP implementation for day to day use. So you find more on this blog about it soon.
The conference have just started, but the level is still high, many papers and smart people. It is good to be here.