Can Aspects Be Injected? Experience with Replication and Protection

Separation of concerns, which allows programming the nun-functional aspects of an application in a more or less orthogonal manner from the functional code, is becoming a general trend in software development. The most widely used architectural pattern for implementing aspects involves indirection objects, raising a performance overhead at execution time. Thus, it appears as being an attractive challenge to be able to inject the code of aspects within the business components of an application in order to avoid indirection objects. With regard to two aspects (replication and protection), this paper replies to the following question: being given the code of an aspect as with an indirection-based implementation, is it possible to use a generic (aspect-independent) tool which would automatically inject this code within the application components ? The results show that this injection process is feasible and can be automated through the handling of a specific injection pattern.