Masters Thesis
Aspect Oriented Programming

Summary

1. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) attempts to separate application code from the services on which it depends. Usually the services provide system level support for transactions, security, threading, messaging, and others that are needed by the application but not central to its mission.
2. Traditional programming provides these services through libraries and modules developed as part of the application's code. AOP provides these services using intercepted calls to specific functions. The interception processing provides the services in a way that is nearly transparent to the using application, leading to simpler, cleaner code. Often interception is defined using code attributes in a declarative style, so instead of calls to library functions to support thread synchronization, for example, we simply decorate the method with a synchronizing attribute.
3. In this work, Ramaswamy investigated AOP, using .Net interception, to provide method synchronization, debugging, code coverage, temporal profiling, and message prioritization. He has shown that these services, some of which would be very hard to provide without interception, can be implemented with the .Net interception mechanism, and that the application part of the code is significantly simpler and easier to understand.