Aspect-Oriented Programming Beyond Dependency Injection

Dependency injection is a hot topic among industrial developers using component frameworks. This paper first mentions that dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming share the same goal, which is to reduce dependency among components for better reusability. However, existing aspect-oriented programming languages/ frameworks, in particular, AspectJ, are not perfectly suitable for expressing inter-component dependency with a simple and straightforward representation. Their limited kinds of implicit construction of aspect instances (or implementations) cannot fully express inter-component dependency. This paper points out this fact and proposes our aspectoriented programming system named GluonJ to address this problem. GluonJ allows developers to explicitly construct and associate an aspect implementation with aspect targets.