Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new, thought-provoking architecture
paradigm still in its youth. One of AOP's primary goals is to improve the
development of object-oriented systems by refactoring related lines of code
that are typically found spread among classes (and are therefore difficult to
maintain).
These blocks of related code represent functional "aspects" of the system,
which now can be written in a single place and then "woven" into the target
application. Logging the start and end of all method calls, securing method
calls, and handling thrown exceptions are all commonly found aspects. While
AOP provides an interesting and effective methodology for refactoring aspects
out of code, how to implement these aspects is still left up to the
developer. This ... (more)
Many changes lurk around the corner for enterprise architectures, including a
wide adoption of Web services, message-based architectures, and eventually
service-oriented architectures. Additionally, XML is quickly becoming the
dominant wire protocol for transferring data between systems, and even
between enterprises.
In an effort to begin transitioning to some of these new technologies, ma... (more)