Malaj: A Proposal to Eliminate Clashes Between Aspect oriented Programming and Object Oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) aims at providing linguistic mechanisms that enable better separation of concerns in program development. Mainstream techniques, like objectoriented programming, do not provide a satisfactory solution to this problem, in that they do not capture the frequent case of aspects that cross-cut system components, and hence cannot be fully encapsulated. On the other hand, AOP is in its early stages, and it is still unclear what are the fundamental design criteria for aspectoriented languages (AOLs). A previous evaluation of a general-purpose AOL suggested that the flexibility gained by the ability to freely intertwine aspect and functional code opens several potential conflicts with the principles of objectorientation. Based on this experience, in this paper we present an alternative approach where the vision of a general-purpose AOL is replaced by the vision of a system where several, independent aspects are gathered, each providing specialized support for a single concern. The hypothesis underlying this work is that such a design approach provides a good compromise between flexibility and preservation of good objectoriented and programming principles.