Aspect Oriented Programming

What the heck is AOP?

Aspect oriented programming is a programming technique just like object oriented programming where you group codes and software designs into objects rather than keeping it as separate functions and logic.

AOP aim to help mitigate and solve the problem of cross-cutting concerns. Cross-cutting concerns are any logic that are not part of your main business logic that are repeated thus you can extract them out into it's own module.

For example: Say you have a class, User that suppose to facilitate the CRUD operation between the databases for a user. You have methods that does the creation, update, read, and delete. Now your manager wants you to add some logging functionalities and/or authentication capability before the operation is carried out. You could hard code them in method by method if it isn't many. But imagine you have hundreds of these classes, hard coding them in those logics are just not going to cut it.

Besides, those logging functionality and authentication are NOT part of the main business logic. Your main business logic is just CRUD operations in this case. So these are cross-cutting concerns they are extra functionality that you are adding to mingle with the main business logic.

AOP aims to solve that problem by extracting those concerns (either logging or authentication, really any extra logic or functionality) out from your main business logic into something called an Aspect.

Then you can just use Aspect whenever you need them.