Region pointcut for AspectJ

Abstract

This paper proposes a new pointcut called region pointcut, which has the ability to pick out regions as join points. This pointcut allows programmers to modularize synchronization, exception handling and parallelization. Although these are typical crosscutting concerns, the join point that we need to advise for such a concern is not a point but a region. The existing aspect-oriented programming language, including AspectJ, provide only the means to pick out points. We modified the AspectBench compiler and implemented region pointcuts as an extension to the AspectJ language.