AOP: Myths and realities

Posted on 2/14/2006 by Ramnivas

IBM developerWorks has published my AOP myths and realities article. In this article, I examine the following common myths around AOP and discuss their realities. Do you have or have you heard of other myths? Let me know. Perhaps I can address them in another article:

Update: There is a good discussion of this article at TheServerSide.com.

  • AOP is good only for tracing and logging
  • AOP doesn’t solve any new problems
  • Well-designed interfaces obviate AOP
  • Design patterns obviate AOP
  • Dynamic proxies obviate AOP
  • Application frameworks obviate AOP
  • Annotations obviate AOP
  • Aspects obscure program flow
  • Debugging with aspects is hard
  • Aspects can break as classes evolve
  • Aspects can’t be unit tested
  • AOP implementations don’t require a new language
  • AOP is just too complex
  • AOP promotes sloppy design
  • AOP adoption is all or nothing
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