Today's Paper: Aspects and Annotations

In an ECOOP 2005 paper, Gregor Kiczale, the father of AOP, and Mira Mezini discusses well about how the notion of annotations (like ones available with Java 5) relates to the notion of aspects. An amazing viewpoint for annotations is to regard them to bind attributes to program points just like procedure calls which bind program points to operations.

• Gregor Kiczales and Mira Mezini, Separation of Concerns with Procedures, Annotations, Advice and Pointcuts, In Proc. of ECOOP 2005 - Object-Oriented Programming: 19th European Conference, Glasgow, UK, July 25-29, 2005. [Abstract/Link]

Title
Separation of Concerns with Procedures, Annotations, Advice and Pointcuts

Abstract

There are numerous mechanisms for separation of concerns at the source code level. Three mechanisms that are the focus of recent attention – metadata annotations, pointcuts and advice – can be modeled together with good old-fashioned procedures as providing different kinds of bindings: procedure calls bind program points to operations, annotations bind attributes to program points; pointcuts bind sets of points to various descriptions of those sets; named pointcuts bind attributes to sets of points; and advice bind the implementation of an operation to sets of points. This model clarifies how the mechanisms work together to separate concerns, and yields guidelines to help developers use the mechanisms in practice.

Today's Person: Ron Bodkin - The AOP Practitioner

Ron Bodkin (his blog), the founder of a venture company, New Aspects of Software, is one of most keen practitioners of AOP. He has many articles and presentations on practical use of aspects in enterprise software development.

For example, one of his recent article mentions about load-time weaving:

• AOP@Work: Performance monitoring with AspectJ, Part 2

His presentation packages are available from:

• http://www.newaspects.com/resources.php

They are some-rights-reserved by creative commons, that is, allowing freely to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and to make derivative works, under some conditions.

A Healthcare Domain-Specific Solution Platform by Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems announces their new platform specialized for the healthcare application domain.
As the market of application servers grows, it is getting to make sense for platform vendors to provide domain-specific frameworks if the market of each domain is enough large.

• Sun Microsystems Unveils New Composite Application to Help Healthcare Providers Meet Their HIPAA National Provider ID Requirement (by Kristi Rawlinson, Sun Microsystems, in WebWire, Dec 5, 2005.)
  

What domains are lucrative, though? The Healthcare domain looks so, at least.