Better Generative Programming with Generic Aspects

After a brief introduction to generative, generic, and aspect-oriented programming, we point out four key elements that appear in the definition of generative programming and that are addressed in this position paper from the perspective of distributed systems development. Then, based on a concrete RMI distribution example, we start motivating how the expressiveness power of generics and the crosscutting modularization power of aspects could be combined in order to achieve highly reusable generic aspects. We conclude by presenting how generic concern-oriented model transformations could help in providing the necessary information to aspect generators for automatically instantiating our generic aspects before weaving them into concrete applications.