On-demand materialization of aspects for application development

Framework-based application development requires applications to be implemented according to rules, recipes and conventions that are documented or assumed by the framework's Application Programming Interface (API), thereby giving rise to systematic usage patterns. While such usage patterns can be captured cleanly using conventional aspects, their variations, which arise in exceptional conditions, typically cannot be. In this position paper, we propose materializable aspects as a solution to this problem. A materializable aspect behaves as a normal aspect for default joinpoints, but for exceptional joinpoints, it turns into a program transformation and analysis mechanism, with the IDE transforming the advice in-place and allowing the application developer to modify the materialized advice within the semantics of the aspect. We demonstrate the need for materializable aspects through a preliminary study of open-source SWT-based applications and describe our initial implementation of materializable aspects in Eclipse.