A Couple of Pragmatic Uses of AOP
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Any new technology usually takes a while for people to really understand it. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is one of those technologies. Despite being introduced in 1997, (that's more than 7 years ago!) it is taking an awfully long time for it to be exploited effectively. The usual aspect oriented usage seems to be confined to logging, tracing, profiling, pooling, cacheing, security and transaction management.
We should take comfort in seeing what's happening in another technology that's similar. That technology is CSS. The similarity is that both technologies use some kind of query mechanism to make modifications of a base structure. AOP does it for programs, CSS does it for HTML. Both effectively provide a quality of obliviousness which leads to a separation of concerns.
CSS adaptation has been equally slow, however, as people have begun to realize that its use makes management of HTML so much easier. That is, its benefits are more structural than functional. The astonishing thing is that people who don't claim to be programmers are beginning to grok the benefits of AOP like functionality!
The use of CSS doesn't automagically make pages look better, the only benefit is that it makes maintaining pages more manageable. Notice, how manageability follows original innovation. Yet, people are calling it a revolution in HTML design. Maybe someday, refactoring to aspects, may also be given the same amount of praise.
Meanwhile, we'll have to content ourselves with the few pragmatic uses that have trickled out in recent days.
The problem with technology that structural in nature, rather than functional, is that its difficult to see its benefits without experiencing it. The above contributions increase the shared experience, overtime the benefits of AOP will become more apparent.
