Monday, April 12, 2004

AspectJ and IoC

Brian McCallister asks an intersting question:

Speaking of AOP -- a problem we have not found a good solution for is using an IoC container with AspectJ. You have no control over how aspects are instantiated at runtime, so you cannot exactly obtain them from a container.

The best we have come up with so far is to provide a static service lookup component that can provide the container to the aspect via a lookup. Yuck, completely breaks the point of the container. Static lookup to obtain a container and then use it to lookup components... far from ideal.

In cases where we've used proxy based AOP the container isn't a problem, but I find myself, and others at the company I work for, leaning more and more towards AspectJ from proxy based options.

Anyone have any ideas?

I wonder if any of my fellow ThoughtWorkers involved in these technologies have a solution?

Related to these, is a great new book I just got, Generative Programming by Czarnecki and Eisenecker. I especially appreciate the illustration of how flexible and forward-looking is C++ which this tome presents. And using Smalltalk to discuss metaobject protocols is very slick also. Too bad there isn't much Lisp. :-)

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