Crosscutting Revision Control System

Abstract

Large and medium scale software projects often require a source code revision control (RC) system. Unfortunately, RC systems do not perform well with obliviousness and quantification found in aspect-oriented code. When classes are oblivious to aspects, so is the RC system, and the crosscutting effect of aspects is not tracked. In this work, we study this problem in the context of using AspectJ (a standard AOP language) with Subversion (a standard RC system). We describe scenarios where the crosscutting effect of aspects combined with the concurrent changes that RC supports can lead to inconsistent states of the code. The work contributes a mechanism that checks-in with the source code versions of crosscutting metadata for tracking the effect of aspects. Another contribution of this work is the implementation of a supporting Eclipse plug-in (named XRC) that extends the JDT, AJDT, and SVN plug-ins for Eclipse to provide crosscutting revision control (XRC) for aspect-oriented programming.