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

Booch's own company is hardly a poster child...

[Raskolnk]

When I was first starting out in programming I read Booch's OOA&D, and spent the next while thinking he was one of the smartest people on the planet.

However, working with Rational's software has tainted Booch's name for me. After dropping the large amount of cache for the entire suite, I think many people realized it would have been better to spend the month or so of man hours getting open source tool x, y, and z up and customized for bug tracking, requirements management, etc; rather than dropping tens of thousands of dollars and spending several months with Rational eating data and hoping the next emergency patch will fix our problems.

I'm well aware of the difficulties in developing large scale software, and I'm not suprised---I've worked on software that was done similar things ;-). But I'd hoped that Rational was a beacon of excellence in an industry full of buggy crap. I guess that's too much to hope for right now. Maybe in another 30 years when "software engineering" has become a _real_ discipline...

I was very impressed that the first edition of OOA&D had examples in CLOS, Smalltalk, C++, and Object Pascal (if I remember correctly). But I tend to think that when he publishes his next book it will be with examples in VBScript (probably on extending various MS Office products to interact with the Rational Suite, while alienating UNIX users).

Re:Don't like it

[jilles]

Hmm, you are fast with your judgement. Too fast and obviously you missed the point and didn't do your homework.

AOP is not about Java but rather a total new way of modeling & programming (obviously the general idea was lost on you), it was just implemented on top of Java as a proof of concept. The people who implemented AspectJ (one of the handfull of aspect oriented languages), made sure that it works well, integrates nicely with the language.

Indeed, AspectJ evolved from just a prototype language a few years ago to a production ready compiler and toolset. The very reason it was created was to allow for industrial validation of the ideas that are behind it. The inventor of AOP (Gregor Kiczalez), figured that in order to do so you needed more than just a prototype language.

BTW. the journal side of things is taken care of by the ACM. They recently had a special issue of Communications of the ACM on AOP. Also nearly any conference on OO systems (e.g. Ecoop, OOPSLA, ICSE) in the past few years had papers on AOP issues (validation, language and compiler issues etc.).

If you want to learn about AOP, look at the tutorial and language spec on aspectj.org. Also be sure to look at the examples they provide.