For Application Development Professionals

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April 14, 2005 Aspect-Oriented Programming Considered Harmful by Carl Zetie

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Executive Summary

There's a new idea in programming languages that is gaining in popularity among some Java language gurus. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is intended to address common problems that object-oriented programming (OOP) doesn't address well, plus some problems that OOP itself created. However, AOP is a risky solution: It is a very generic mechanism for solving some very specific concerns and has been likened to a kind of "GOTO" statement for OOP. Like GOTO, it can cause more harm than good. AOP will find some uses among authors of frameworks and other infrastructure projects, but for the needs of typical application developers, language gurus would do better to address the shortcomings of the Java language and of containers that make AOP appear to be necessary. AOP might seem like an esoteric debate among programmers, but it's not one that decision-makers can afford to ignore.

This is an excerpt