An Analysis of Development Speed of Crosscutting Code Using Aspect Oriented Programming

In Object Oriented Programming language there exists crosscutting concerns (e.g. logging, validation, transaction etc.) across multiple modules causing the code scattering, code confusion and making the system difficult to maintain and to extend. Aspect-Oriented Programming is a new technology and can provide more ideal modularized structure for programming where Aspects can be defined to modularize such concerns. Although aspect orientation claims to permit a better modularization of crosscutting concerns, it is still not clear whether the development time for such crosscutting concerns is increased or decreased by the application of aspect oriented techniques. The study addresses this issue by comparing the development times of crosscutting concerns in OOP techniques and aspect-oriented composition techniques using the Java and AspectJ. In that way, the experiment reveals opportunities and risks caused by aspect-oriented programming techniques in comparison to object oriented ones. After studying the impact of Aspect-Oriented Programming on the development speed for crosscutting code, due to the transparency between aspect-oriented program and the base program it is observed that AOP is suitable for parallel programming, and yet achieves parallelization based on Java multi-thread mechanism. A mechanism can be proposed to achieve automatic parallelization among aspects and base program.