On the duality of aspect-oriented and feature-oriented design patterns

Abstract

Design patterns aim at improving reusability and variability of object-oriented software. Despite a notable success, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been discussed recently to improve the design pattern implementations. In another line of research it has been noticed that feature-oriented programming (FOP) is related closely to AOP and that FOP suffices in many situations where AOP is commonly used. In this paper we explore the assumed duality between AOP and FOP mechanisms. As a case study we use the aspect-oriented design pattern implementations of Hannemann and Kiczales. We observe that almost all of the 23 aspect-oriented design pattern implementations can be transformed straightforwardly into equivalent feature-oriented design patterns. For further investigations we provide a set of general rules how to transform aspect-oriented programs into feature-oriented programs.