USING ASPECT-ORIENTATION FOR SOFTWARE MIGRATION

A replacement of 3rd party tools such as database systems or persistence frameworks occur quite often in practice. Possible reasons are license costs, customer requirements or missing functionality. Such a migration usually means exchanging API calls and dealing with functional differences. Problems occur if some functionality cannot be emulated. This paper proposes and explains the use of aspect-orientation to handle severe problems in migration scenarios. A migration project is introduced the goal of which was to replace the persistence framework Hibernate with OpenJPA. This migration involved challenging problems where the application of aspect-oriented programming has provided simple and straightforward solutions.