On the Duality of Aspect-Oriented and Feature-Oriented Design Patterns

Design patterns aim at improving reusability and variability of object-oriented software. Despite a notable success, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) has been discussed recently to improve the design pattern implementations. In another line of research it has been noticed that Feature-Oriented Programming (FOP) is related closely to AOP and that FOP suffices in many situations where AOP is commonly used. In this paper the authors explore the assumed duality between AOP and FOP mechanisms. As a case study they use the aspect-oriented design pattern implementations of Hannemann and Kiczales.