Adding dynamic reconfiguration support to JBoss AOP

The majority of aspect-oriented middlewares supporting dynamic aspect weaving fail to preserve important safety properties while weaving or unweaving a distributed aspect at runtime. This position paper looks in particular at the safety properties of structural integrity and global state consistency. Preserving these two safety properties in the presence of dynamic change has already been extensively addressed in the space of dynamic reconfiguration of component-based distributed systems. As will be argued in this position paper, existing coordination protocols developed in this space can be largely reused for distributed aspect weaving provided that some small adaptations are made to account for the aspect-oriented composition mechanisms. To demonstrate results and as a proof-of-concept, we describe how we have ported the NeCoMan dynamic reconfiguration support on top of the JBoss AOP framework. As a result, system-wide consistency can be preserved in JBoss when weaving or unweaving a distributed aspect at runtime.