research-article

Domain-specific languages and program generation with meta-AspectJ

Authors:

Shan Shan Huang,

Yannis SmaragdakisAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 18, Issue 2

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/1416563.1416566

Published: 12 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Meta-AspectJ (MAJ) is a language for generating AspectJ programs using code templates. MAJ itself is an extension of Java, so users can interleave arbitrary Java code with AspectJ code templates. MAJ is a structured metaprogramming tool: a well-typed generator implies a syntactically correct generated program. MAJ promotes a methodology that combines aspect-oriented and generative programming. A valuable application is in implementing small domain-specific language extensions as generators using unobtrusive annotations for syntax extension and AspectJ as a back-end. The advantages of this approach are twofold. First, the generator integrates into an existing software application much as a regular API or library, instead of as a language extension. Second, a mature language implementation is easy to achieve with little effort since AspectJ takes care of the low-level issues of interfacing with the base Java language.

In addition to its practical value, MAJ offers valuable insights to metaprogramming tool designers. It is a mature metaprogramming tool for AspectJ (and, by extension, Java): a lot of emphasis has been placed on context-sensitive parsing and error reporting. As a result, MAJ minimizes the number of metaprogramming (quote/unquote) operators and uses type inference to reduce the need to remember type names for syntactic entities.

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Cardoso ERibeiro RReis LBigonha MBigonha RDi Iorio VHung CPapadopoulos G(2019)An attribute language definition for adaptable parsing expression grammarsProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3299738(1518-1525)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
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Cuadrado Jde Lara J(2018)Open meta-modelling frameworks via meta-object protocolsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2018.07.023145(1-24)Online publication date: Nov-2018
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Index Terms

Domain-specific languages and program generation with meta-AspectJ
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
    2. Software libraries and repositories

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 18, Issue 2

November 2008

130 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/1416563

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 12 November 2008

Accepted: 01 October 2007

Revised: 01 April 2007

Received: 01 December 2005

Published in TOSEM Volume 18, Issue 2

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3485542
Cardoso ERibeiro RReis LBigonha MBigonha RDi Iorio VHung CPapadopoulos G(2019)An attribute language definition for adaptable parsing expression grammarsProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3299738(1518-1525)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297280.3299738
Cuadrado Jde Lara J(2018)Open meta-modelling frameworks via meta-object protocolsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2018.07.023145(1-24)Online publication date: Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2018.07.023
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