Aspect-oriented programming with enterprise JavaBeans

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) provides special functionalities such as transaction, persistence, location transparency and security. These functionalities can be considered as aspects and EJB can be regarded as an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) environment. However, its architecture has no extensibility and flexibility to add or modify aspects, so it is not considered as a general AOP environment and hard to be applied to diverse domains. In this research, a new EJB server, named AES, is designed and implemented. An aspect exists independently of a container, and can be added and updated as needed. A container is changed into a generalized metaobject supporting more aspects in a flexible and extensible way. Also, an EJBObject is changed as a reference aspect supporting various network protocols. To prove flexibility and extensibility of AES, a testing application and user-defined aspects are developed. Finally, overhead for supporting AOP in EJB is measured.