Modularity First: A Case for Mixing AOP and Attribute Grammars

The authors have reimplemented the frontend of the extensible AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ, using the aspect-oriented meta-compiler JastAdd. The original frontend was purely object-oriented. Each frontend extends Java with AspectJ and an additional set of pointcuts in a modular fashion. In this paper the authors give a detailed comparison of both approaches and show a number of advantages of using JastAdd: the implementation is half the size, twice as fast, concerns are better localised, extensions are composable, and computations are automatically scheduled. JastAdd provides a very constrained form of static AOP where only inter-type declarations and method execution interception are supported.