AO challenge - implementing the ACID properties for transactional objects

Abstract

This paper presents a challenge case study to the aspect-oriented community: ensuring the ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) for transactional objects. We define a set of ten base aspects, each one providing a well-defined reusable functionality. The base aspects are simple, yet have complex dependencies among each other. We then show how these base aspects can be configured and composed in different ways to implement different concurrency control and recovery strategies. This composition is delicate: some aspects conflict with each other, others have to be reconfigured dynamically at run-time. We believe that this case study can serve as a benchmark for aspect-oriented software development, in particular for evaluating the expressivity of aspect-oriented programming languages, the performance of aspect-oriented programming environments, and the suitability of aspect-oriented modeling notations.