Using Aspect-Oriented Programming for Design Patterns Implementation

Object-oriented design patterns are useful for designing software programs or components, which are based on objects. Object-orientation has however some limitations that a more recent approach known as aspect- orientation, or more generally as "advanced separation of concerns" try to eliminate. This paper presents and motivates the beginning of some work aim- ing to identify and gain from the benefits of implementing object-oriented de- sign patterns using an aspect-oriented programming language. We more particularly present an implementation of the Visitor design pattern (6) using the AspectJ programming language (9). This implementation eases the trace of the pattern application in programs and may thus improve the separate reuse of both pattern and main application code.