A Software Development Environment for Enabling Insertion of Debug Code by Using Aspect-Orientation

Abstract

We propose Bugdel, which is a software development environment for enabling insertion of debug code by using Aspect-Orientation. Separating debug code from application program is a well known example of Aspect-Oriented programming (AOP). However, general-purpose AOP languages such as AspectJ are not perfectly suitable for debugging. For example, developers can not insert debug code at any position in source file. Another problem is that local variables in a debugged program are not accessible from debug code written as an aspect. Moreover, developers must study the language specification of AspectJ for just debugging. On the other hand, Bugdel is an Aspect-Oriented system specialized for debugging. It allows developers to specify a line number in a source file for pointcuts and to access local variables available at the pointcut position from advice code. Moreover, Bugdel enables to specify pointcuts through GUI.