Phlogiston Blue book review - Aspect Oriented Software Development

I picked up this book to review because I wanted to learn what Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) was all about. I chose the correct book, and found out more than I ever wanted to know about the subject!

Anyone who has written an object oriented program of even moderate size or complexity will have discovered that no matter how carefully you try to resolve the problem into loosely coupled classes, there are always some issues that spread themselves across all your object boundaries. Debugging information, logging and security are examples that spring immediately to mind.

In AOP these issues are known as 'crosscutting' issues or concerns, and AOP is an effort to deal with these problems. To simplify greatly (this is not the place for a major discussion of AOP) AOP handles this by concentrating the crosscutting code in its own classes and then arranging for a separate compiler, or pre-compiler, to weave the crosscutting code into the appropriate places in the other classes. As you can imagine figuring out the appropriate places is not a trivial task!

The book itself will give any competent programmer a thorough understanding of AOP, and also some excellent ideas about design and analysis using Aspect Oriented methods. The book is cutting edge stuff, and requires hard intellectual work, but it is, in my opinion well worth the effort. The editors have brought together some thirty papers on the topic, and they provide a useful assessment of the state of the art.

One caution though. Don't expect to be able to read this book and then leap out and start programming in an AOP language, such as AspectJ. Much work remains to be done before Aspect Oriented Programming is ready to move out of the academic world and into the rough and tumble of production work.

It's not a cheap book, or an easy read, and it won't immediately impact your work. Nonetheless, I thought it was well worth the time I put into reading it, and it did give me some ideas about how to improve my non-AOP programming.

(Book supplied by ACCU)

Alan Lenton
10 July 2005

Aspect Oriented Software development
by Robert E Filman, Tzilla Elrad, Siobhan Clarke and Mehmet Aksit
0-321-21976-7
Addison-Wesley 755pp $59.99

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