Pointcut Design with AODL

The designing of pointcuts is a crucial step in Aspect-Oriented software development. Pointcuts decide the places where aspects interact with the base system. Without designing these pointcuts properly, the weaving process of aspects with the base system cannot be modelled efficiently. A good design of pointcuts can ensure proper identification of join points, clear representation of advice-pointcut relationships and overall efficiency of the weaving process of the system. The existing approaches do not design pointcuts separately from their parent aspects, which hinders in identifying pointcut conflicts before the implementation of the system. This paper provides a set of graphical notations to represent join points, pointcuts, advices and aspects. A graphical diagram has been proposed that shows the relationships between pointcuts and their relevant advices. The paper also provides a technique to represent and document pointcuts along with their related advices and corresponding base elements in a tabular way. The technique can help in resolving two of the most complicated problems of pointcut modelling, the fragile pointcut problem and the shared join point problem.