Home Page - 2004-04-25
Post date: Nov 29, 2008 4:26:14 AM
AOP, Proxy, and Metadata [Read this article]
AOP in its basic spirit, can be realized if you understand the nice capabilities that are possible when we can intercept any method call, or other joinpoints. Of course, understanding this way, will not teach you the various idioms in decomposing an application into aspects. That is an art (at least for now). It is like saying, that by knowing inheritance or polymorphism, conjuring the need for design patterns is not trivial at all. But that does not mean that the basic techniques are any different. It is only that knowing the tools of the trade doesn't make you a good craftsman. Knowing to play flute will not necessarily make you a musician.
My assumption all along, was that to intercept method calls, you need an AOP tool... Then I stumbled upon java.lang.reflect.Proxy. I now remember seeing it before, but have never thought of it to be useful, at least for my daily needs. The amazing thing is, it is there from J2SE 1.3...
...Without Annotation, we have to use naming conventions, or the method signature. Now we can elegantly do that with Annotation (or Metadata).
 Why Calculus? [Read this renamed article]
The title of this article was originally published as Volume of Sphere & Calculus. But in all its internal drafts it was provocatively called as Why Calculus? In fact, it was written mainly to understand the reasons for the existance of the math disicpline called Calculus. So after some insistance from Ganesh, the title was reverted back to its old glory. Incidently, the URL was all along having this old name, hence no change in the URL.