The big benefits of using AspectJ are the ability to build more interesting coherent logic with a higher level language rather than (virtual) assembly language, and to have a well-document, accessible extension language for custom monitors.
First off, it's quite ridiculous to claim that an open source technology with no marketing behind it is somehow a "buzzword." AOP is gaining interest because of the success of those who are using it. When I was with the AspectJ team at Xerox PARC we did a workshop with IBM and they decided to invest significantly in the technology for internal use (not for marketing). AspectJ is now shipping inside WebSphere.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact there are two articles on DeveloperWorks that I wrote last fall that describe how to use AspectJ to do more advanced performance monitoring (that are cited in the original article). See http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library /j-aopwork10/ and http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library /j-aopwork12/
The big benefits of using AspectJ are the ability to build more interesting coherent logic with a higher level language rather than (virtual) assembly language, and to have a well-document, accessible extension language for custom monitors.
Ron Bodkin
Feature variation, usage metering, Error handling, error isolation, performance monitoring, account suspension, role-based and data-driven security, transaction management, failure injection for integration tests, performance monitoring, dirty tracking, relationship integrity management, architectural enforcement, raising business events, caching, prefetching ...
Need I go on?
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.