Sophisticated crosscuts for e-commerce

AOP [2] introduced the notion of crosscutting concerns in programming. An aspect groups a crosscut (aka. pointcut in Aspect-J [3]) which relates several points of interest (aka. join points) of the base application with an action (aka. advice) to be performed. This article argues for a clear separation of crosscut and action de nitions. The tools for AOP currently available support only simple crosscut de nitions, which hinders the separation of crosscuts and actions. In this paper we advocate that more sophisticated crosscuts can solve this problem. This article discusses two aspects in the context of a simple e-commerce application. First, we present this AOP example using simple crosscut de nitions only. Then we give an alternative version where sophisticated crosscut de nitions enable us to clearly separated crosscuts and actions. Finally, we brie y discuss bene ts of elaborate crosscuts de nitions in AOP.