Summary: Formalizing the Temporal Order of Join Points 
Paul C. Attie Sergei Kojarski David H. Lorenz
Northeastern University
College of Computer & Information Science
Boston, Massachusetts 02115 USA
E­mail: fattie,kojarski,lorenzg@ccs.neu.edu
Abstract
Crucial to the programming and debugging of complex
aspect­oriented programs is the ability to specify and mon­
itor temporal ordering amongst join­points. We present a
temporal logic specification of such constraints in AspectJ.
This provides a formal semantics for join­point occurrences
and is a step towards the formal verification of AOP pro­
grams. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach through
the formalization and implementation of aspects in AspectJ.
1 Introduction
One purpose of Aspect­Oriented Programming (AOP) is
to make software clearer by modularizing cross­cutting con­
cerns into aspects. However, in the current state of AOP, an
unfortunate consequence of using aspects is the difficulty of

Source: Attie, Paul - Department of Computer Science, American University of Beirut

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences