A Comparative Study of Aspect-Oriented and Object-Oriented Implementations: Pervasive System Use Case

Abstract

Pervasive computing is becoming a reality. On the one hand, they will be deployed into a diversity of small devices and appliances, and on the other hand, they must be aware of highly changing execution contexts. Adaptation is the key crosscutting concern of pervasive computing applications. In this paper, we discuss our experience of implementing an adaptive display environment using Aspectoriented programming. We compare the aspect-oriented implementation with independently developed object-oriented implementation of the environment. The comparison demonstrates that an aspect-oriented approach is indeed more effective in modularizing adaptation in a reusable, maintainable and evolvable fashion. It also reduces the complexity of the implementation with respect to the above three desirable attributes. At the same time, our experience challenges some of the existing conceptions about aspect granularity within an application and also highlights the need for development guidelines and idioms.