Towards Aspect-Oriented Programming for Context-Aware Systems: A Comparative Study

Development of modular context-aware applications has been a deep challenge to software engineers. One of the main reasons is the crosscutting nature of certain context-awareness concerns. Specific distributed aspect-oriented programming (AOP) techniques have recently emerged as a promising candidate to address these shortcomings. This paper reports our ongoing effort on the definition of relevant criteria to perform a comparative analysis of five emerging AOP approaches for context-aware systems. We evaluate to what extent their specialized linguistic mechanisms scale to distributed systems, in particular context-aware mobile systems.