Aspect-oriented Refactoring: Taking Refactoring to a New Level

Refactoring allows reorganizing code while preserving the external behavior, while AOP facilitates modularizing crosscutting concerns in a system through use of a new unit of modularity called aspect. Aspect-oriented refactoring synergistically combines these two techniques to refactor crosscutting elements. Individually, refactoring and AOP both share the high-level goal of creating systems that are easier to understand and maintain without requiring huge upfront design effort. A combination of the two – aspect-oriented refactoring – helps in reorganizing code corresponding to crosscutting concerns to further improve modularization that is easy to understand, highly consistent, and simple to change.

Aspect-oriented refactoring provides means beyond conventional refactoring techniques. While steps in conventional refactoring modularize code to a certain point, the use of AOP squeezes out the code that cannot be further refactored. Aspect-oriented refactoring offers substantial improvement to the code in a variety of situations: exception handling policies, local contract enforcements, resource management and optimization schemes, concurrency control, worker object creation, and so forth.

This presentation will examine fundamentals of aspect-oriented refactoring, a few common patterns, and a few examples in J2EE space. The presentation features live coding to illustrate the ideas learned.

About Ramnivas Laddad

Ramnivas Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is a Spring Framework and Cloud Foundry committer. Ramnivas is also the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. He has spoken at many leading industry events including JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, and O'Reilly OSCON. In recent years, Ramnivas has become a Scala fan. Ramnivas lives in the Silicon Valley.

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