ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book grew out of our experience with the special issue on aspect-orientation in the October, 2001 Communications of the ACM. Seven times as many papers were submitted to that issue as we could print; those that appeared proved among the most popular in the ACM digital library. Simultaneously, we saw a growing number of increasingly popular workshops on aspect-oriented topics. There was clearly great interest in the computer science community for learning more about aspects. This led to two ideasestablishing an international conference on aspect-oriented software development and creating a book to illustrate to the advanced software development community the diversity of ideas in this space. The conference, organized by the Aspect-Oriented Software Association and co-sponsored by ACM, has recently had its third annual meeting; the proceedings are in the ACM digital library.

We intend this book as a volume for advanced software engineers interested in learning about this new direction in software development. To populate the book, we sent out invitations to selected researchers in the field either to submit a new paper presenting an overview of their work or to nominate an appropriate existing paper for reprinting. This book is the result of selecting from and editing those submissions.