Aspect
  • A “concern” is a specific requirement or consideration that must be addressed in order to satisfy the overall system goal.
  • Crosscutting concerns are encapsulated in separate modules, called “aspects”, so that localization can be achieved.
  • Any application is composed of multiple functional and non-functional concerns. Functional concerns are relevant to the actual use of the application, whereas non-functional concerns pertain to the overall quality attributes of the system, such as the performance, transactions and security. Even applications that are designed in a highly modular fashion suffer from tangling of functional and non-functional aspects.
  • Usecases that AOP mechanisms are useful in: security, logging, monitoring, transactions, and caching.

Implementation

  • There are two varieties of crosscutting, static (compile time) and dynamic (at runtime)
  • A “join point” is an identifiable point of execution in an application, such as a call to a method or an assignment to a variable
  • A “pointcut” identifies a join point in the program at which a crosscutting concern needs to be applied.
  • An “advice” is a piece of code implementing the logic of a crosscutting concern. It is executed when a specified pointcut is reached.

Frameworks

  • AspectJ
  • JBoss AOP
  • AspectWerkz
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