An Integrated Crosscutting Concern Migration Strategy and its Application to JHotDraw

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, four-step strategy for migrating crosscutting concerns from object-oriented systems to aspect-oriented solutions, demonstrated through a large-scale case study on JHotDraw.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic, integrated approach to concern migration and applies it to a real-world system, resulting in the largest open-source aspect refactoring project to date.

Findings

Successful migration of JHotDraw concerns to aspect-oriented implementation

Insights into challenges and best practices for automatic aspect refactoring

Validation of the feasibility of large-scale concern migration

Abstract

In this paper we propose a systematic strategy for migrating crosscutting concerns in existing object-oriented systems to aspect-based solutions. The proposed strategy consists of four steps: mining, exploration, documentation and refactoring of crosscutting concerns. We discuss in detail a new approach to aspect refactoring that is fully integrated with our strategy, and apply the whole strategy to an object-oriented system, namely the JHotDraw framework. The result of this migration is made available as an open-source project, which is the largest aspect refactoring available to date. We report on our experiences with conducting this case study and reflect on the success and challenges of the migration process, as well as on the feasibility of automatic aspect refactoring.