Aspect Oriented Programming

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Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding additional behavior to existing code without modifying the code itself, instead separately specifying which code is modified via a 'pointcut' specification, such as “log all function calls when the function's name begins with 'set'”. This allows secondary behaviors (eg logging) to be added to a program without cluttering the meaty code that's core to the functionality.

Design

• The AspectConfiguration specifies which aspect applies to which method of an object
• Each aspect is essentially a method (or a separate class containing a group of those aspect-methods) written in an aspect-oriented language (or annotation, or through an idiom in an existing language).
• Aspects are wrapped 'before', 'after' or 'around' methods. For example we can specify in the aspect configuration that an aspect will get called before or after a certain method in an object. This means that we don't make changes to our existing codebase, but only on the Aspect configuration.

Steps:

1. Identify the cross-cutting concerns and write them as aspects
2. Configure where the aspects apply - which methods and when they trigger

Enough of this fancy lingo. This is basically just another general purpose programming idiom, also known as “Execute Around Pointer” in C++, with the intent to help us focus on the important parts of the code, delegating secondary functionality to automation. To do that in C++ we provide a smart pointer object, typically as a nested class in the class we want to “execute around” which transparently executes actions before or after each function call on the external class object, given that the actions performed are the same for all functions.

I have developed this demo on my Windows , using IntelliJ IDEA 2018.1 for Java and Microsoft Visual Studio for C++. The C++ part lies in the cpp folder.

For the Java aspectJ implementation you can find in-depth details in java_aspectj.pdf (written in the Greek language - if I get requests I may be persuaded to translate to English).

Acknowledgements

AOP kiczales-ECOOP1997

Github

Github repository link.