An Overview of AspectJ

Gregor Kiczales, Erik Hilsdale, Jim Hugunin, Mik Kersten, Jeffrey Palm, William G. Griswold. An Overview of AspectJ. In Jørgen Lindskov Knudsen, editor, ECOOP 2001 - Object-Oriented Programming, 15th European Conference, Budapest, Hungary, June 18-22, 2001, Proceedings. Volume 2072 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 327-353, Springer, 2001. [doi]

Abstract

AspectJ™ is a simple and practical aspect-oriented extension to Java.. With just a few new constructs, AspectJ provides support for modular implementation of a range of crosscutting concerns. In AspectJ’s dynamic join point model, join points are well-defined points in the execution of the program; pointcuts are collections of join points; advice are special method-like constructs that can be attached to pointcuts; and aspects are modular units of crosscutting implementation, comprising pointcuts, advice, and ordinary Java member declarations. AspectJ code is compiled into standard Java bytecode. Simple extensions to existing Java development environments make it possible to browse the crosscutting structure of aspects in the same kind of way as one browses the inheritance structure of classes. Several examples show that AspectJ is powerful, and that programs written using it are easy to understand.