RG: A Case-Study for Aspect-Oriented Programming

RG is an image processing system that allows sophisticated image processing operations to be defined by composing primitive image processing filters. An implementation of RG using OOP is easy to do and quite manageable, but its performance is severely lacking. The OOP approach turns out not to be well-suited to addressing the performance problems because the performance issues we want to handle do not respect object or method boundaries and cannot be effectively addressed in a paradigm tied to those boundaries. Aspect-oriented programming is an approach designed to handle complexities arising from such cross-cutting issues. This paper presents a casestudy of how this limitation of OOP was overcome using aspect-oriented programming techniques, such that the performance problems were adequately addressed without compromising the original OOP architecture of the system.