The Adapter – An Abstraction Mechanism for Aspect Weaving

Although the aspect-oriented technology allows aspect weaver to weave aspect components across the function boundary, it seems that current aspect-oriented technologies are not handling the hardwired linkage well. The hardwired linkage can be typically found in reflection-based AOP approaches to date, and it may raise different issues regarding which kind of weavers (general-purposed or domain-specific) is used. This paper considers that the hardwired linkage is not a trivial issue, and might restrict the aspect-oriented concepts to be further practically applied to the large-scaled software development. To deal with the hardwired linkage issues this paper presents the adapter object model, which is characterized by 1) extending the object model that programmers can attach different attributes onto individual behavior declared in the traditional object (e.g., C++ object), and then 2) separating this object model into three parts, namely the functional object, the adapter and the meta object. The first allows the base object can be reserved intact while merging new aspects. The second is designated in a way that the meta-level customization can be encapsulated and modularized by a virtual adapter. And then, by plugging the virtual adapter into base objects, programmers can concrete the virtual adapter with respective to each object’s status and affect the decision-making in the meta-level customization. In this way, we expect that the hardwired linkage issue can be dealt with and thus support the reuse of the meta-level customization for a variety of objects.