paradigms - Do you use AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) in production software?

Question

AOP is an interesting programming paradigm in my opinion. However, there haven't been discussions about it yet here on stackoverflow (at least I couldn't find them). What do you think about it in general? Do you use AOP in your projects? Or do you think it's rather a niche technology that won't be around for a long time or won't make it into the mainstream (like OOP did, at least in theory ;))?

If you do use AOP then please let us know which tools you use as well. Thanks!

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20663/do-you-use-aop-aspect-oriented-programming-in-production-software

Answer 1

Yes.

Orthogonal concerns, like security, are best done with AOP-style interception. Whether that is done automatically (through something like a dependency injection container) or manually is unimportant to the end goal.

One example: the "before/after" attributes in xUnit.net (an open source project I run) are a form of AOP-style method interception. You decorate your test methods with these attributes, and just before and after that test method runs, your code is called. It can be used for things like setting up a database and rolling back the results, changing the security context in which the test runs, etc.

Another example: the filter attributes in ASP.NET MVC also act like specialized AOP-style method interceptors. One, for instance, allows you to say how unhandled errors should be treated, if they happen in your action method.

Many dependency injection containers, including Castle Windsor and Unity, support this behavior either "in the box" or through the use of extensions.