AspectJ Cookbook

Chapter 22. Applying Enterprise Scale Aspects

Introduction

An enterprise-scale application often has to consider factors that are above and beyond the scope of more traditional desktop software. Those concerns can be good candidates for an aspect-oriented approach because they are rarely closely coupled to the core business logic of the software.

Concerns such as transactional behavior, distributed communications, and security implications are the mainstays of any serious enterprise system. Even tasks such as providing and enforcing development guidelines, often a headache for large systems development, are shown to benefit from AspectJ’s capability to advise the compiler.

Because so much of an enterprise system is not core to an application’s business logic, these systems are seen as one of the areas where aspect orientation comes into its own. Enterprise systems are the fastest growing area for aspect orientation, and the aspects in this chapter represent a small selection of some of the concerns within those systems that benefit from an aspect-oriented approach.

Tip

Evidence of the rapid adoption of aspect-oriented techniques in enterprise systems appears in the work within the leading J2EE communities. In particular, the open source Spring Framework (http://www.springframework.org) and JBoss (http://www.jboss.org) communities incorporate fairly mature implementations of aspect orientation and, with commercial companies, notably IBM, staunchly backing the approach, aspect-oriented ...