Linux Magazine: Zen and the Art of Aspect-Oriented Programming

"Consider the life cycle of a typical e-commerce project. First, you might decide to architect your code around an object-relational (OR) mapping tool, such as Java Data Objects or Hibernate, and J2EE services, such as servlets and the Java Authentication and Authorization Service. Next, you create interfaces and classes representing business concepts such as a customer, SKUs, a shopping cart, inventory, and payment authorization. At this point, your code is clean and comprehensible.

"Then you encounter some inexplicable, intermittent behavior. 'Of course! I need logging,' you say. So, you meticulously modify all of the methods in all of the classes to use log(). Now when a bug occurs, you examine the log and understand the sequence of activities that lead to the bug..."

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