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Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development X pp 1–38Cite as

A Fine-Grained, Customizable Debugger for Aspect-Oriented Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TAOSD,volume 7800))

Abstract

To increase modularity, many aspect-oriented programming languages provide a mechanism based on implicit invocation: An aspect can influence runtime behavior of other modules without the need that these modules refer to the aspect. Recent studies show that a significant part of reported bugs in aspect-oriented programs are caused exactly by this implicitness. These bugs are difficult to detect, because aspect-oriented source code elements and their locations are transformed or even lost after compilation. We investigate four dedicated fault models and identify 11 tasks that a debugger should be able to perform for detecting aspect-orientation-specific faults. We show that existing debuggers are not powerful enough to support all identified tasks, because the aspect-oriented abstractions are lost after compilation.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a debugger for aspect-oriented languages using a dedicated intermediate representation preserving the abstraction level of aspect-oriented source code. This is based on a model of the more general formalism of advanced dispatching. Based on this model, we implement a user interface with functionalities supporting the identified tasks, such as visualizing pointcut evaluation and program composition. Due to the generality of our intermediate representation, our debugger can be used for a wide range of programming languages. To account for the syntactic differences among these languages, we allow language designers to customize the textual representations on the user interface.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Group, University of Twente, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Haihan Yin, Christoph Bockisch & Mehmet Akşit

Authors
  1. Haihan Yin
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  2. Christoph Bockisch
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  3. Mehmet Akşit
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 439C Harris Center, Building 116, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, 32816-2362, Orlando, FL, USA

    Gary T. Leavens

  2. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, 113-8656, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Shigeru Chiba

  3. PLEIAD Laboratory, Computer Science Department (DCC), University of Chile, Blanco Encalada 2120, Santiago, Chile

    Éric Tanter

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Yin, H., Bockisch, C., Akşit, M. (2013). A Fine-Grained, Customizable Debugger for Aspect-Oriented Programming. In: Leavens, G.T., Chiba, S., Tanter, É. (eds) Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development X. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36964-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36964-3_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36963-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36964-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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