Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

aspect-oriented programming
     
         (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to
        abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond
        simple functional modules and thereby improve the {quality} of
        software.
     
        Mechanisms for defining and composing {abstractions} are
        essential elements of programming languages.  The design style
        supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current
        languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised
        components that can be called upon to perform a function.
     
        But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align
        with the system's functional components, such as failure
        handling, {persistence}, communication, replication,
        coordination, {memory management}, or {real-time} constraints,
        and tend to cut across groups of functional components.
     
        While they can be thought about and analysed relatively
        separately from the basic functionality, programming them
        using current {component-oriented languages} tends to result
        in these aspects being spread throughout the code.  The
        {source code} becomes a tangled mess of instructions for
        different purposes.
     
        This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless
        complexity in existing software systems.  A number of
        researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem
        that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects
        of concern in a separate and natural form, and then
        automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final
        executable form.  These approaches have been called
        aspect-oriented programming.
     
        {Xerox AOP homepage
        (http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/)}.
     
        {AspectJ (http://AspectJ.org/)}.
     
        {ECOOPP'99 AOP workshop
        (http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/aop-ecoop99/)}.
     
        (1999-11-21)