Aspect-Oriented Programming Article On JavaWorld

Some Guy writes: "Javaworld has another article (the second in a series of three) on Aspect-Oriented Programming. Grady Booch wrote last year that AOP is one of three signs of a disruptive software technology in the horizon: a technology that could take us to the next level beyond object-oriented programming."

Comments

Re:AOP is a reinvention of multi-dispatch function

[jilles]

and unsurprisingly the inventor of AOP (Gregor Kiczalez) also wrote a book on the meta object protocol (meta programming in CLOS). It's funny how people try to dismiss stuff by comparing it to stuff they do know. Aspects are of course easy to implement in Lisp (just as most other language features we know). The original, quite interesting, paper on AOP at Ecoop '97 even used CLOS for the examples. Lisp is a very powerfull language, however it is also very hard to use.

Kiczalez realized that if he'd stick to lisp, AOP would never work because ordinary C++/Java programmers would never be able to understand it (just like they never grasped meta programming, reflection and whole bunch of other advanced language concepts). Hence he made an implementation of AOP based on Java. One of the design goals was interoperability with Java so that the transition would be as easy as possible.

Now the difference between the visitor pattern and AOP is that the visitor pattern affects the design of your program (i.e. the places where visitors are used must explicitly call a visitor) whereas the usage of aspects is transparent.