We have reimplemented the frontend of the extensible AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ, using the aspect-oriented meta-compiler JastAdd. The original frontend was purely object-oriented. Each frontend extends Java with AspectJ and an additional set of pointcuts in a modular fashion. In this paper we give a detailed comparison of both approaches and show a number of advantages of using JastAdd: the implementation is half the size, twice as fast, concerns are better localised, extensions are composable, and computations are automatically scheduled.

JastAdd provides a very constrained form of static AOP where only inter-type declarations and method execution interception are supported. However, additional modularisation mechanisms from the compiler construction community are supported in the form of demand-driven evaluation and attribute grammars. Our implementation would not have benefited from a richer pointcut language, while both demand-drive evaluation and declarative attributes were essential in enabling composable extensions and flexible modularisation.

We believe that the AOP community at large can benefit from acknowledging demand-driven evaluation as an important modularisation mechanism. Also, reference attribute grammars enhance the extensible implementation of graph-based computations that rely on context-sensitive information.

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 @inproceedings{aosd08avgustinov,
   author = {Avgustinov, Pavel and Ekman, Torbj\"orn and Tibble, Julian},
   title = {Modularity First: A Case for Mixing AOP and Attribute Grammars},
   booktitle = {AOSD'08: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development},
   editor = "Mira Mezini", 
   year = {2008},
   series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
   location = {Brussels, Belgium},
   publisher = {Springer},
   address = {Berlin, Germany},
 }