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Chemical foundations of distributed aspects

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Abstract

Distributed applications are challenging to program because they have to deal with a plethora of concerns, including synchronization, locality, replication, security and fault tolerance. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a paradigm that promotes better modularity by providing means to encapsulate crosscutting concerns in entities called aspects. Over the last years, a number of distributed aspect-oriented programming languages and systems have been proposed, illustrating the benefits of AOP in a distributed setting. Chemical calculi are particularly well-suited to formally specify the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. The join calculus is a functional name-passing calculus, with both distributed and object-oriented extensions. It is used as the basis of concurrency and distribution features in several mainstream languages like C# (Polyphonic C#, now C\(\omega \)), OCaml (JoCaml), and Scala Joins. Unsurprisingly, practical programming in the join calculus also suffers from modularity issues when dealing with crosscutting concerns. We propose the aspect join calculus, an aspect-oriented and distributed variant of the join calculus that addresses crosscutting and provides a formal foundation for distributed AOP. We develop a minimal aspect join calculus that allows aspects to advise chemical reactions. We show how to deal with causal relations in pointcuts and how to support advanced customizable aspect weaving semantics. We also provide the foundation for a decentralized distributed aspect weaving architecture. The semantics of the aspect join calculus is given by a chemical operational semantics. We give a translation of the aspect join calculus into the core join calculus, and prove this translation correct by a bisimilarity argument. This translation is used to implement Aspect JoCaml on top of JoCaml.

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Notes

  1. http://spring.io.

  2. http://www.jboss.org.

  3. http://cloudstack.apache.org/.

  4. This article builds upon a previous conference publication [53]. Much of the text has been completely rewritten. The aspect join calculus has been simplified and clarified, in particular by removing the type system and the management of classes, because they are orthogonal to the extensions considered in this work. In addition, the technical treatment has been extended in many ways, including more expressive quantification, per-reaction weaving, and decentralized weaving. The translation from the aspect join calculus to the standard join calculus has been updated accordingly, as well as the proof of correctness of the translation. Finally, an implementation based on JoCaml is presented and provided online.

  5. There is a good reason why we choose a variant of the join calculus with objects; we discuss it later in Sect. 3.4, once the basics of aspects in the calculus are established.

  6. We further discuss dealing with causality in Sect. 5.1.

  7. Syntactically, the main differences with our calculus are that conjunction is noted | instead of & and disjunction of rules is noted \(\wedge \) instead of or. Also, there are no objects with labels, only channels.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable and detailed suggestions on how to improve this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inria, Nantes, France

    Nicolas Tabareau

  2. PLEIAD Lab, Computer Science Dept (DCC), University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Éric Tanter

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  1. Nicolas Tabareau
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Correspondence to Éric Tanter.

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The implementation of Aspect JoCaml, together with running examples, is available online at: https://tabareau.github.io/AJoCaml/.

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Tabareau, N., Tanter, É. Chemical foundations of distributed aspects. Distrib. Comput. 32, 193–216 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-018-0334-6

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