Aspect Oriented Programming
I was looking into Ruby’s TracePoint class recently. TracePoint is an objectified Kernel#set_trace_func method. TracePoint was added in Ruby2, but before that there was a gem that had same function as TracePoint class. Surprisingly, it was also called tracepoint.
Anyways, TracePoint is not the scope of this post. This post is all about AOP, or Aspect Oriented Programming.
Wikipedia defines it as “aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. AOP forms a basis for aspect-oriented software development.”
There are couple of things worth noting, Modularity and Cross-cutting concerns.
Modularity
In English, Modularity means based on modules, easily assembled, or repaired and the reason it’s easily repaired is because modules are self-contained and talk to each other via a defined interface. Interface could be hardware pins, RAM slots, or intangible ones, defined in your Ruby or Java class.
In Ruby world, modules and modularity is the go-to thing to achieve separation of concern. You got a piece of code that is used in two different places and has no state of its own, just create a module to be included/extended or prepended.
Cross-cutting concerns
Cross-cutting concern can be defined as any piece of code that’s more widely used across the application, for example, logging, security, or authentication, perhaps. Something, like a before_filter in Rails controllers that’s applied to a set of actions.
There are libraries that one could use to achieve same and even more than before_filter functionality outside of Rails. The one that I briefly looked at is called Aspector. It provides a lot of examples as well just in case you are stuck.
Why not just use Ruby Modules?
Ruby modules are similar but not exactly same as the AOP concept. One important difference is that you can apply an aspect (aspect is the piece of code with common functionality, like a module) to a class from outside, without opening the class. Here’s some aspector code snippet to elaborate the point:
TestAspect.apply A
Here A is the class, and TestAspect is the aspect. As you can see, you can just apply it from outside. Sorry, not very clear, but I didn’t want to tie the concept to a particular library implementation.
One good use case of using AOP concepts would be with something like debugging, for example, a user performed an action and you want to check the log for parameters that are getting passed in to methods, or what methods are getting called when certain action is performed. But, that’s what TracePoint does, right? Well, it definitely allows one to hook into the events and print debugging information. With AOP, one can create more focussed debugging. Imagine, a request going through Rails stack will hit a lot of methods and you don’t want to enable tracing and then having to go through a long console output.
These are just some of the initial thoughts I had on reading AOP and TracePoint. Hope this post will encourage you to investigate and learn more about these topics.