Aspect Oriented Programming

[armtuk]

Over the last couple of days, in an effort to simplify the development of the PDF Library I am working on, I have been fiddling a bit with aspect oriented programming. I have been hearing increasing amounts about aspect oriented programming for some time, so I finally decided to look into it a bit more. I found a PowerPoint presentation that was given by the Xerox Parc people about AspectJ, the Aspect Oriented wrapper for Java, and read the first 2/3 of it, and started experimenting. This is where I found that the PP was way old, and was in-fact using an archaic syntax that was no longer supported. I downloaded the plug-in for Eclipse that supported AspectJ and that came with some examples that cleared things up. Yesterday we went to Borders Books in King of Prussia, and they had the AspectJ in Action book, so I picked that up and have started perusing the contents thereof, although with an eye to the functional as I am working on stuff that really really needs to get done in a hurry. I have used a couple of aspects now to really help debugging the work I am doing, and it's very cool. Really cuts down on the insertion of System.out.println() calls in the code, and keeps the code nice and clean. So far I really like it.