Damon: a decentralized aspect middleware built on top of a peer-to-peer overlay network

Abstract

In this paper we present Damon, a decentralized wide-area runtime aspect middleware built on top of a structured peer-to-peer (p2p) substrate and a dynamic Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) framework. By using this methodology, we provide innovative benefits like aspect persistence and discovery, a high performance one-to-one/one-to-many messaging system, reflective skills, and a decentralized aspect container. Furthermore, new pointcut abstractions (anypointcut, manypointcut and multipointcut) are introduced, which allow development of shared aspect functionalities in a transparent way. We believe that such middleware is a novel solution for allowing decentralized crosscutting concerns like fault-tolerance or load-balancing for distributed systems. This paper describes these ideas and it presents a use case of our middleware implementation.