A Debug Interface for Debugging Multiple Domain Specific Aspect Languages

Abstract

Research in the area of multi-DSAL development has been mainly devoted to enabling the interoperability of multiple aspect mechanisms. Less attention has been given to making programming with multiple aspect languages practical. For domain specific aspect languages (DSALs) to be used in practice, there is a need for tools that make multi-DSAL development effective. This paper focuses on one such tool: a debugger. We define a multi-DSAL debug interface (MDDI) for inspecting the composition specification and the runtime state and behavior of applications written in multiple DSALs. To implement the interface, a multi-DSAL debug agent and special debug attributes are introduced into the weaving process. A concrete implementation of MDDI over the Awesome aspect composition framework is presented. For validation we demonstrate a simple command-line AwesomeDebugger that uses the debug interface.