@techreport{TR-IC-06-08,
  number = {IC-06-08},
  author = {Fernando Castor Filho and Nelio Cacho and
            Eduardo Figueiredo and Raquel Maranhão and
            Alessandro Garcia and Cec{\'{\i}}lia Mary F. Rubira},
  title = {Exceptions and Aspects: The Devil is in the Details},
  month = {May},
  year = {2006}, 
  institution = {Institute of Computing, University of Campinas},
  note = {In English, 21 pages.
    \par\selectlanguage{english}\textbf{Abstract}
        One of the fundamental motivations for employing exception
        handling in the development of robust applications is to
        lexically separate error handling code so that it can be
        independently reused and modified. It is usually assumed that
        the implementation of exception handling can be better
        modularized by the use of aspect-oriented programming
        (AOP). However, the trade-offs involved in using AOP with this
        goal are not yet well-understood. This paper presents an
        in-depth investigation of the adequacy of the AspectJ language
        for modularizing exception handling code.  The study consisted
        in refactoring existing applications so that the code
        responsible for implementing heterogeneous error handling
        strategies was moved to separate aspects. We have performed
        quantitative assessments of four systems - three ob
        ject-oriented and one aspect-oriented - based on four
        fundamental quality attributes, namely separation of concerns,
        coupling, cohesion, and conciseness. Our investigation also
        included a multi-perspective analysis of the refactored
        systems, including (i) the reusability of the aspectized error
        handling code, (ii) the beneficial and harmful aspectization
        scenarios, and (iii) the scalability of AOP to aspectize
        exception handling in the presence of other crosscutting
        concerns.
  }
}