Aspect-Oriented Programming for Web Controller Layer

We propose a new domain-specific aspect-oriented programming (AOP) mechanism for Web application development. A variety of crosscutting concerns such as access control and performance tuning are found in typical Web applications, but it is not easy to concisely modularize the concerns as aspects in current AOP languages because they do not provide pointcut mechanisms for directly handling events in the Web controller layer. To deal with this problem, we propose a Web-specific AOP mechanism called AOWP and a PHP-based AOWP framework. Using this framework, a programmer can easily address Web-specific crosscutting concerns triggered by Web-specific events, including page requests, page transitions, and session management events.