Aspectual Contracts to Manage Invasive Access

Bart De Win, Wouter Joosen

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

A considerable share of today's AOSD tools provide the capability of breaking the encapsulation of modules (= invasive module access). While this support might be necessary in order to modularize and/or refactor crosscutting concerns, it has a clear negative impact on several important software properties (for instance, it becomes very hard to ensure the security of a software system, or to support its evolvability). In a first part of this talk we will discuss and illustrate this problem in more depth. Afterwards, we will present our work on interference contracts, which is essentially a way to deal with this problem at the component contract level.