Interaction Analysis for Fault-Tolerance in Aspect-Oriented Programming?

The key contribution of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is the encapsulation of crosscutting concerns in aspects, which facilities modular reasoning. However, common methods of introducing aspects into the system, incorporating features such as implicit control-flow, mean that the ability to discover interactions between aspects can be compromised. This has profound implications for developers working on fault-tolerant systems. We present an analysis for aspects which can reveal these interactions, thus providing insight into positioning of error detection mechanisms and outlining candidate containment units. We also present Aida, an implementation of this analysis for the AspectJ language.