Guide to Demeter Publications

The list of recent publications from our group is getting longer. Here is some guidance on how to read the publications. If you want to read 3-4 papers, I suggest the following selection:

Checking the Law of Demeter in AspectJ. This paper describes the Law of Demeter and how to check it using AspectJ. The Law of Demeter was the starting point of our work on Aspect-Oriented and Adaptive Programming and it is educational to see the Law of Demeter expressed in aspects.
DJ: Dynamic Adaptive Programming in Java. Gives a good introduction to adaptive programming in Java, using the Java library DJ. DJ has a short learning curve and exposes the concepts of Adaptive Programming as Java classes.
Aspect-Oriented Programming with Adaptive Methods is a very short paper on DJ that appeared in the Communication's of the ACM 2001 special issue on AOP.
Navigating through Object Graphs Using Local Meta-Information gives a short mathematical introduction to how traversals work.

(Old Guide from 1998:

If you want to read 3-4 papers, I suggest the following selection:

the first conference paper on Adaptive Programming although the ideas were introduced before in ECOOP and OOPSLA tutorials.
Preventive Program Maintenance in Demeter/Java . International Conference on Software Engineering, Boston, MA, 1997. This two page paper summarizes Demeter/Java and describes how it solves the structural anomaly problem.
The third recommended paper is a recent design methodology paper (OOPSLA 98) and shows how traversal strategies advance component software development.
Softening Dependencies between Interfaces . Technical Report: NU-CCS-98-07, August 1998. contains a simple but very useful application of traversal strategies in the context of application programmer interfaces.

)

Connection to Aspect-Oriented Programming from Xerox PARC

The first book on Adaptive Programming (AP book) is available on-line and contains material from many pre-1995 papers in an integrated form.

A recent theoretical paper on traversal strategies improves on the traversal technology described in the AP book. Makes adaptive programming much simpler and more powerful. Strategies are implemented in DemeterJ (DOWNLOAD LINKS ARE HERE) .

Demeter Home Page

Completed Theses

Older Papers

Theory of Adaptive Programming

Search Engine. Use if to find information with keywords (CCS site).

Karl J. Lieberherr

College of Computer Science, Northeastern University

Cullinane Hall, Boston, MA 02115

Internet: demeter@ccs.neu.edu

Fax: (617) 373 5121