A Study Of Applications Of Aspect Oriented Programming

Abstract-The code to implement systemic or non-functional features of software (like logging, security, authentication etc.) is often scattered across the application reducing the cohesiveness, maintain ability and quality of software. The non functional features cut the system orthogonally and are called global or crosscutting concerns. The crosscutting concerns are hard to modularize as they affect multiple systems, functions, features, modules etc. Aspect Oriented programming (AOP) is a new programming paradigm that promises the localization and modularization of these crosscutting concerns. It provides another level of abstraction by separating the implementation of crosscutting behavior in separate modular units called “aspects”. AOP is now being used to implement the crosscutting concerns like performance monitoring, synchronization, caching,, security etc. In this paper, we discuss Aspect Oriented Programming. We give a brief idea of AspectJ language (an aspect oriented extension of Java). We give an overview of applications of AOP in different areas like caching, authentication, performance optimization, performance monitoring etc. We illustrate with examples, how crosscutting concerns like tracing, logging, exception handling, authorization can be implemented using AOP