AOP != Interception

这是一篇“老”文章。最近在研究AOP，也尝试了JBoss的AOP解决方案，故而对AOP的核心思想、Interception体系结构在AOP中的地位产生了兴趣。Ted的这篇文章阐述精到，令我受益良多。

——————————

Setting the Story Straight: AOP != Interception
Recently, a number of authors and writers have been talking about AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming), and how incredibly powerful and wonderful the whole thing is. And yet, for the vast majority of them, what they're really referring to is an old pattern called Interception. These people aren't stupid, nor are they misguided; while Interception is a powerful mechanism in its own right, it's not the same as AOP, and while they do share a number of defining characteristics, to understand AOP as Interception is like thinking OOP is data structs plus a bunch of function pointers. Just as we didn't understand objects until we got past the idea that objects are "just code and data", if we're to truly understand the potential power inherent in AOP, we need to get beyond this thinking that Interception and AOP are the same thing. They're obviously related at some points, but that's not the same thing as equality.

Definitions

For starters, because 90% of all arguments are based on differences in semantics, let's establish our terminology up front. Specifically,

• Aspect-Oriented Programming:
  • "Aspect-oriented software development is a new technology for separation of concerns (SOC) in software development. The techniques of AOSD make it possible to modularize crosscutting aspects of a system." --AOSD homepage
  • "The central idea of AOP is that while the hierarchical modularity mechanisms of object-oriented languages are extremely useful, they are inherently unable to modularize all concerns of interest in complex systems. Instead, we believe that in the implementation of any complex system, there will be concerns that inherently crosscut the natural modularity of the rest of the implementation.
    "AOP does for crosscutting concerns what OOP has done for object encapsulation and inheritance--it provides language mechanisms that explicitly capture crosscutting structure. This makes it possible to program crosscutting concerns in a modular way, and achieve the usual benefits of improved modularity: simpler code that is easier to develop and maintain, and that has greater potential for reuse. We call a well modularized crosscutting concern an aspect." --An Overview of AspectJ
• Interception: "The Interceptor architectural pattern allows services to be added transparently to a framework and triggered automatically when certain events occur." --Patterns of Software Architecture, Vol 2 by Schmidt et. al, p. 109

At first blush, these two sound amazingly similar--Interceptors fire at certain execution points in order to provide additional behavior to the object methods they hijack, and formalized AOP "weaves" code into declarative points in the source code to add additional behavior above and beyond the objects they crosscut. As with so many things, however, the difference is really in the details and the layer beneath what's immediately obvious. As part of this discussion, howe