A Case Study for Aspect-Based Updating

Rather than upgrading a software system to the next version by installing a new binary, software systems could be updated "On-the-fly" during their execution. The authors are developing a software evolution system that leverages aspect technology. As changes typically spread across several classes, they can handle updates like other crosscutting concerns: they encapsulate all changes, constituting a logical update, in one aspect. In this paper, they evaluate their approach. They report on a case study about the evolution of a Java application. The analysis provides details about how classes change between versions, and how these changes would be expressed in terms of updating aspects.