ArrayPT: Join Points for Array Element Access in AspectJ

The field access pointcuts of AspectJ do not support array objects in full. When an element of an array object is set or referenced, the corresponding index values and assigned value are not exposed to the advice. This small project presents an extension of AspectJ¡¦s field access pointcuts for exposing such useful context information in referencing an array field. We have implemented this extension using the abc compiler for AspectJ. The core of our implementation is a finite-state machine based pointcut matcher that can handle arrays of multiple dimensions in a uniform way.

1. K. Chen and C.H. Chien, "Extending the Field Access Pointcuts of AspectJ to Arrays," 2006 International Workshop on Software Engineering, Databases, and Knowledge Discovery, held with ICS 2006, Taipei, Taiwan, Dec. 6, 2006.  (paper and slides)

The most recent version is 1.0, which has been tested with abc-1.0.2, abc-1.1.0, and abc-1.2.0. Both its sources and binaries are available for download.

Sources:

To build ArrayPT 1.0, you will need:

• the abc source code and all its required libraries (see http://www.aspectbench.org/ for details);
• the ArrayPT 1.0 source code for the compiler and the runtime libraries. Unzip these two compression files in the appropriate locations under the abc source diretory. Here is what the directory structure would look like:

Binaries:

Get the compiler here: arraypt-1.0.jar
Get the runtime libraries here: arraypt-runtime-1.0.jar

Example:

Click here to get the code that demonstrates how to use ArrayPT.

Before you can compile or run the example code, you must include the following jar files in the CLASSPATH environment variable.

• arraypt-1.0.jar
• arraypt-runtime-1.0.jar
• the jar files for the abc compiler, its runtime libraries, and all other required libraries such as soot, jasmin, polyglot and java_cup

To compile the example code, use:

      abc -ext abc.ajex ArrayPTDemo.java

And, to run the example code, use:

      java ArrayPTDemo

Chin-Hung Chien and Kung Chen

Chin-Hung Chien is a senior software engineer at Foxconn Electronics Inc.
Kung Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the National Chengchi University, Taiwan.

• abc: The AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ
• Other Projects Using abc