A Catalog of Aspect Refactorings for Spring/AOP

Abstract

The importance of enterprise applications in current organizations makes it necessary to facilitate their maintenance and evolution along their life. These kind of systems are very complex and they have several requirements that orthogonally crosscut the system structure (called crosscutting concerns). Since many of the enterprise systems are developed with the Spring framework, can be taken advantage of the benefit provided by the aspect-oriented module of Spring in order to encapsulate the crosscutting concerns into aspects. In this way, the maintenance and evolution of the enterprise systems will be improved. However, most of the aspect refactorings presented in the literature are not directly applicable to Spring systems. Along this line, in this work we present an adaptation of a catalog of aspect refactorings, initially presented for AspectJ, to be used with Spring/AOP. Also, we conduct a case study in which two enterprise applications developed with the Spring framework are refactored in order to encapsulate their crosscutting concerns into aspects.