The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Enterprise applications are the large-scale software programs used to operate and manage large organizations, and their effect on our lives cannot be underestimated. This work presents better tools for developing such applications. We argue that middleware frameworks, the main tool used today for handling this development task, are not flexible enough, whereas the promising new approach of aspect-oriented development (AOP) does not, in its current form, scale up to handle large applications properly. We present /shakeins/ as a means for properly integrating AOP to middleware frameworks, giving them the flexibility they lack. Shakeins are a novel programming construct which, like mixins and generic classes, generates new classes from existing ones in a universal, uniform, and automatic manner: From a given class, a shakein generates a new class which has the same type as the original, but with different data and code implementation. We argue that shakeins are restricted, yet less chaotic, aspects, and therefore are well suited for the introduction of AOP into existing middleware applications and frameworks. Time allowing, a review of our related research for integrating AOP in middleware applications will also be given, including JTL, AspectJ2EE, factories, and object evolution.