Towards a Hybrid Approach to Build Aspect-Oriented Programs

The success of new programming paradigm such as the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) relies mainly on solid support tools and advanced development environments. However, the productivity is still restricted by a text-based primary input method at coding level, what makes program understanding, building, and maintaining difficult for developers. To reduce such difficulties, we propose to take the AOP out of the conventional style of coding by using a new approach, which is partially visual. The approach is intended to better support the coding process by introducing more interactivity and a high-degree of flexibility. We seek to minimize the influence of language syntax on overall usability by using the ordinary drag-and-drop technique to overcome the weaknesses of text-based style to the of AOP paradigm. Our approach has been implemented in an Eclipse-based prototype tool and evaluated through a controlled experiment to prove its feasibility and usefulness. As preliminary results, we notice that programmers were able to express effectively crosscutting concerns with a high-level of interactivity.