Aspect Oriented Programming

The development of a software system comprises amongst others the design and implementation of the basic functionality and of other system aspects such as synchronisation, distribution, error handling, memory optimisation and security management. While functional and object oriented decomposition are well suited for the design and implementation of the basic functionality, these techniques cannot cope well with the other aspects. When using these techniques, the aspects are spread over the system and tangled with the code for the basic functionality. They don't modularise well together with the decomposition of the basic functionality of a system and also cannot be modularised on their own with functional or object oriented decomposition techniques, i.e. separation of concern is not well supported for such aspects. Clearly, this situation has a negative impact on the quality of a software system. Aspect oriented programming (AOP) aims at supporting the separation of concern for the above mentioned aspects. AOP is a continuous development of the object oriented paradigm, and as such it supports aspect oriented decomposition in addition to object oriented decomposition and functional decomposition. See [1,4] for an overview on AOP. Requirements for Aspect Language