Section 1.2. AspectJ

1.2. AspectJ

It is fair to say that the most significant work to date that is actually labeled under the banner of aspect orientation was completed at that historical wellspring of computing innovation, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Xerox initially invested in producing special-purpose aspect-oriented languages prior to moving to a general-purpose model in Java. AspectJ was the outcome of this effort and is the core development tool for the recipes found throughout this book.

At the time of this writing, AspectJ is a rapidly maturing aspect-oriented development tool with a wealth of examples available. In 2002, Xerox PARC made the important decision of transferring the development of AspectJ to a more open forum on the eclipse.org web site. Current download figures for AspectJ show that interest in the approach is increasing at an exponential rate, and that the software development community is recognizing that aspect orientation is an extremely important evolution in software development. Now is the time to use this book's real-world, aspect-oriented recipes to add this new and powerful tool to your software development repertoire.