Content area
Full text
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is an exciting new development in the field of software engineering. The open-source AspectJ® project has taken a leading role in defining what an aspect-oriented programming language should look like and in building tools that enable aspect-oriented techniques to be employed in the development of large-scale commercial software. IBM both contributes to the development of AspectJ and uses it internally with its accompanying IDE (integrated development environment) support, AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT). This paper provides an introduction to aspect-oriented programming using AspectJ and AJDT. We also discuss the role that open source (and being an open-source project) has played in the ongoing development of AspectJ, and how this has facilitated a level of collaboration and exploitation that would not have been possible otherwise.
The first paper to use the term aspect-oriented programming (AOP) was published in 1997 by a research group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC**).1 Since that time, interest in aspectoriented programming has steadily grown to the point that it now attracts large audiences at developer conferences, and a growing number of companies are using AOP to build production applications. In this paper we first introduce AOP and the benefits it brings and then look at the AOP language AspectJ**.2 AspectJ is an open-source project initiated by PARC and now led by IBM. The AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) project3 is a related open-source project, also led by IBM, that provides IDE (integrated development environment) support for programming with AspectJ within the Eclipse IDE. After introducing the language and tools, we discuss the adoption of AspectJ within IBM. The paper concludes by considering the role that open source has played both in the development of AspectJ and AJDT and in IBM's involvement in that process.
WHAT IS AOP?
AOP is a term used to describe a programming technique and a way of thinking about the construction of software applications that complements the forms of expression found in object-oriented programming. The goal of AOP is to improve the modularity of software applications, making them easier to develop, test, and maintain. Aspectoriented programs comprise of a mixture of objects and aspects. Both encapsulate state and behavior, but whereas the behavior in an object is executed only when explicit calls are...