Friday May 7

Aspect-Oriented

I've just been reading about a new style of programming touted by IBM called "Aspect-Oriented Programming". It took a while to track down a decent explanation, but finally I stumbled upon this tutorial.

This is a really neat idea, and it immediately struck me as being analogous to a technology that most of my readers know well: CSS. AOP is like CSS for object-oriented code. It gives you a pattern-matching language (like CSS selectors) which selects a point in OO code, and then executes another piece of code before/after the selected code is executed.

Just like CSS gives web designers the ability to completely alter the appearance of a web page without changing the markup, AOP lets you completely alter the behavior of a program without changing the program. Neat!