The Northeastern Branch of the History of AspectJ

Aspect-Oriented Software Development has several roots, one of them
at Northeastern University. We started with observing that 
in object-oriented programs, traversal-related concerns cut across
the class structure. This lead to Adaptive Programming (AP)
where we not only encapsulate the traversal-related concerns but
we also loosen them from class infrastructure. Next we
observed that the synchronization concern does not align well with the
class and method structure and we developed a domain specific aspect language,
called synchronization patterns (later it evolved to COOL) [Lopes/Lieberherr ECOOP 1994].
The next step was a second domain specific aspect-language called
GOOP (later it evolved to RIDL) for remote interaction [Lopes95].

In collaboration with Xerox PARC, we developed implementations 
of those languages in our Demeter system and we noticed several
overlaping features of both implementations that invited us
to develop a general purpose weaving language to factor out the commonalities.

At about the same time, Gregor Kiczales and Crista Lopes and other
researchers at Xerox PARC
evolved their first version of AspectJ which included implementations
of both COOL and RIDL to a general 
purpose aspect-oriented programming language.
AspectJ has greatly evolved into a powerful AOP language. 

From the Aspect Weaver of the DemeterJ tool:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/DemeterJava/UserManual/node6.html#SECTION00600000000000000000

Enhancing methods and interfaces:

AugmentMethod  ::= InsertPlace <name> FullMethodName JavaCode .
InsertPlace    ::= "before:" | "after:" .
FullMethodName ::= <classname> Ident "." GenMethodName
		   [<args> MethodArgTypes] .
		   GenMethodName  ::= Ident | "*" .

For example: 
before: MyClass.* (@
  System.out.println("Entering some method of class MyClass");
@)

Will prepend each method of MyClass with the 
code shown. 

In AspectJ:

 before(): execution(* MyClass.*(..)) {
     System.out.println("Entering a method "+thisJoinPoint);
 }


To implement an interface in an existing class, use: 


"implement:" InterfaceName "in:" ClassName ";" .
For example: 

implement: java.util.Enumeration in: MyStack;

In AspectJ:

 declare parents: MyStack implements java.util.Enumeration;

=================================

@InProceedings{Lopes95b,
author =       "Cristina Videira Lopes",
title =        "Graph-based optimizations for parameter passing in
remote invocations",
editor =       "Luis-Felipe Cabrera and Marvin Theimer",
pages =        "179-182",
booktitle =    "4th International Workshop on Object Orientation in
Operating Systems",
year =         "1995",
organization = "IEEE",
publisher =    "Computer Society Press",
address =      "Lund, Sweden",
month =        "August",
annote =       "IWOOOS'95, short version"
}