Introduction

Aspects in AspectJ are objects in their own right and they benefit from the traditional object-oriented (OO) mechanisms that make object orientation such a great approach for software development.

When using the OO concepts of association and composition, then the rules for aspects are fairly simple: an aspect can contain or use other classes without using any unique syntax. If you ignore some irregular method signatures, a class can use an aspect as if it were just another class.

This chapter deals with the details of inheritance between aspects and classes and some of the special things to consider when defining these relationships.