This work presents an Aspect-Oriented Framework for the XMLVM toolchain, an open-source, cross-compilation toolchain, to address the issue of using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) within programming languages that do not have strong AOP support. With this framework, the aspect can be written in one language, such as AspectJ, the most widely used and supported AOP language, the base code can be written in another, for example C#, and the produced output file from XMLVM, containing the weaved-in code, can be in any language, including Java and C#. The research conducted in this work indicated that the optimal language for writing aspects is AspectJ and that existing AOP frameworks lack some important properties, including support for multiple input/output languages and easy extensibility, prompting the implementation of this framework, whose key concept is the use of stylesheets (XSL) and stylesheet transformations (XSLT) to perform the weaving. The concepts surrounding this project are presented and the design and implementation for the initial framework are explained in detail. Testing of the framework produced expected results suggesting successful cross-language weaving.

Aspect-Oriented Framework, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), AspectJ, cross-compilation, cross-language weaving, XMLVM, XSL, XSLT

Ilias Konstantinidis