Aspect-oriented programming beyond dependency injection

Abstract

Dependency injection is a hot topic among industrial developers using component frameworks. This paper first mentions that dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming share the same goal, which is to reduce dependency among components for better reusability. However, existing aspect-oriented programming languages/ frameworks, in particular, AspectJ, are not perfectly suitable for expressing inter-component dependency with a simple and straightforward representation. Their limited kinds of implicit construction of aspect instances (or implementations) cannot fully express inter-component dependency. This paper points out this fact and proposes our aspect-oriented programming system named GluonJ to address this problem. GluonJ allows developers to explicitly construct and associate an aspect implementation with aspect targets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.