AOP Applied, lessons from a J2EE project

Aspect Oriented Programming offers enhanced modularity and cleaner separation of crosscutting concerns. That's all fine and well for architecture geeks. But can it help your project today? Has anyone applied it in the real world? The answer is “yes,” and in this session, an AOP expert and early adopter will demonstrate how his team used aspect oriented programming to implement non-trivial business concerns. Along the way attendees will learn about advantages of AOP and understand some of the problems encountered adopting it.

This session will give an overview of how the Adbase team at VMS (http://vmsinfo.com) brought AspectJ into a J2EE data integration project. It will start with showing how aspects provided a clean way to debug errors in a third party library. A more complex example will illustrate how AOP helped dynamically update shopping cart prices without requiring extensive modifications to the domain objects. Finally, the class will cover one of the first reusable aspects developed by the company—an aspect to manage relationships between persistent objects. The last part of the presentation will examine the challenges of and tactics for AOP adoption. Attendees will learn what compromises were necessary, how the team scaled the learning curve, and which development practices helped ease adoption and mitigate risk.