Invited paper at FATES/RV 2006, Seattle, USA, August 2006.

Authors: Pavel Avgustinov, Eric Bodden, Elnar Hajiyev, Laurie Hendren, Ondrej Lhotak, Oege de Moor, Neil Ongkingco, Damien Sereni, Ganesh Sittampalam, Julian Tibble, and Mathieu Verbaere
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Abstract

A trace monitor observes the sequence of events in a system, and takes appropriate action when a given pattern occurs in that sequence. Aspect-oriented programming provides a convenient framework for writing such trace monitors. We provide a brief introduction to aspect-oriented programming in AspectJ. AspectJ only provides support for triggering extra code with single events, and we present a new language feature (named tracematches) that allows one to directly express patterns that range over the whole current trace. Implementing this feature efficiently is challenging, and we report on our work towards that goal. Another drawback of AspectJ is the highly syntactic nature of the event patterns, often requiring the programmer to list all methods that have a certain property, rather than specifying that property itself. We argue that Datalog provides an appropriate notation for describing such properties. Furthermore, all of the existing patterns in AspectJ can be reduced to Datalog via simple rewrite rules. This research is carried out with abc, an extensible optimising compiler for AspectJ, which is freely available for download.

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BIBTEX:

           @inproceedings{fatesrv06abc, 
           author = "Pavel Avgustinov and 
                         Eric Bodden and
                         Elnar Hajiyev and 
                         Laurie Hendren and
                         Ond{\v{r}}ej Lhot{\'{a}}k and
                         Oege de Moor and 
                         Neil Ongkingco and
                         Damien Sereni and
                         Ganesh Sittampalam and
                         Julian Tibble and
                         Mathieu Verbaere", 
           title = "Aspects for Trace Monitoring", 
           booktitle = "Formal Approaches to Testing Systems and Runtime Verification { (FATES/RV)}", 
           editor = "Klaus Havelund and
                     Manuel Nunez and
                     Grigore Rosu and
                     Burkhart Wolff", 
           series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
           year = "2006", 
           publisher = "Springer"}