AOP: Does it Make Sense ? The Case of Concurrency and Failures

Concurrency and failures are fundamental problems in distributed computing. One likes to think that the mechanisms needed to address these problems can be separated from the rest of the distributed application: in modern words, these mechanisms could be aspectized. Does this however make sense? This paper relates an experience that conveys our initial and indeed biased intuition that the answer is in general no. Except for simple academic examples, it is hard and even potentially dangerous to separate concurrency control and failure management from the actual application. We point out the very facts that (1) an aspect-oriented language can, pretty much like a macro language, be beneficial for code factorization (but should be reserved to experienced programmers), and (2) concurrency and failures are particularly hard to aspectize because they are usually part of the phenomenon that objects should simulate. They are in this sense different than other concerns, like for instance tracing, which might be easier to aspectize.