AOSD – Finally Thoughts
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.