A language workbench for implementing your favorite extension to AspectJ

Abstract

Many extensions to AspectJ are proposed and prototyped. However, without a supportive language workbench the proper evaluation and production of these extensions is often prohibitively costly. We demonstrate a novel language workbench for creating such extensions, comprising Awesome and Spoofax. The implementation of two advanced extensions to AspectJ are illustrated: explicit join points (EJPs) and closure join points (CJPs). Not only were these extensions fully implemented from scratch with reasonable effort, but also our implementations support advanced features that were omitted in the original prototypes. The demonstration will provide a hands-on overview of the process of implementing EJPs and CJPs in our workbench and how one can implement other extensions with relative ease.