CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch1 1w27 ms

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)

__AOP__

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) refers to a new way of designing software. It aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. AOP includes programming methods and tools that support the modularization of concerns at the level of the source code. It is not a replacement to popular Object Oriented Programming (OOP), but is complimentary to it.

Overview

Aspect-oriented programming entails breaking down program logic into distinct parts, called concerns. Nearly all programming paradigms support some level of grouping and encapsulation of concerns into separate, independent entities by providing abstractions (e.g., procedures, modules, classes, methods) that can be used for implementing, abstracting and composing these concerns. But some concerns defy these forms of implementation and are called crosscutting concerns because they "cut across" multiple abstractions in a program. An example to this is logging. In an normal object oriented language program we might need to invoke a logger function from everywhere we this functionality.