Slashdot Mirror
Unit Test Your Aspects
An anonymous reader writes "The widespread adoption of programmer testing over the past five years has been driven by the demonstrable productivity and quality of the resulting code. Find out why and how to do it, as this article introduces you to the benefits of testing aspect-oriented code and presents a catalog of patterns for testing crosscutting behavior in AspectJ."
Why does it seem like unit testing is only taught in Java programming courses? I have never seen this in any C/C++, C# or Visual Basic courses.
Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it. When I was in school, we talked about unit testing, but never really did it very well. By employing the latest buzzwords such as JUnit and Spring in your design, it's much less work to build your unit tests that it would be with other languages.
I also think, for better or worse, the the Java community is much more open to the latest toys than users of the other established languages are, which may explain why the XUnit variants in other languages haven't taken off as well.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Aspect Oriented Programming is actually just a remake of the old comefrom pun. However, AOP is not a pun. It's a real life atrocity that should have been slain at birth. It can be visualized as having a piece of code "steal" the instruction pointer from somewhere inside another piece of code. And some morons seem to think that this constitutes good software engineering...
No, I'm not shitting you here, it's actually true! It just sounds like a joke.
And for the record: No, I don't hate Java. Quite on the contrary, I love Java. Furthermore, I am a heavily certified and devoted Java-only developer, and have been for 7 years. But AOP is a big-time fuck-up.
>> how does it relate to object-oriented programming?
It doesn't. Then again, most developers don't even know exactly what OOP really is, and what conceptually separates it from other paradigms. Hell, most "developers" don't even know what a programming language paradigm is.
So it all boils down to the buzzword factor.
Aspects are great because the provide a useful means to abstract the relationships for policies, so we can finally cleanly capture hard problems like performance monitoring, consistent error handling, enforcing data security, or allowing product line variability for changing features in an application. This last one is the strategic reason for IBM investing: they can open source components but still integrate with different runtimes.
Obviously you've considered this really carefully. I can just imagine your intellectual predecessors sitting there 25 years ago fuming about how polymorphism makes it impossible to tell where a call in the program goes. "Leave my line numbers ALONE"
Aspects are great because the fact is that traditional OO just doesn't do a good job of modularizing (look it up) these hard but important problems. Of course, you also should consider the real world consequences of this problem (code gen, overweening frameworks, fragile code, etc.) Aspects promote good maintainable software for the real world. Just as was the case with OO, this new level of indirection requires some learning and good tools support.