A Comparison of Approaches Toward Reusable Aspects

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is designed to reduce maintenance and improve reuse of software components by separating crosscutting concerns from core concerns.In current most mature and widely used AOP approach, such as AspectJ, crosscutting concerns are modularized in aspects and connected to main program using pointcuts.However, the way that aspects and main program are associated leads to tightly coupling between aspects and the target classes and thus the aspects may not be reusable as might be expected.This paper introduces four different AOP approaches that have achieved reusable aspects to a certain extent and makes a comparison of them on four different criteria.Additionally, we put forward two future research directions for better reusable aspects.