What are the possible AOP use cases?

Question

I'd like to make a picture of what are the possible cases for effective involvement of AOP in application design. All I have met so far is:

• logging-related
• security checks
• transaction management
• tweaking of a legacy application

Anything else?

(It doesn't have to be necessarily Spring's proxy based AOP - rather JBoss AOP.)

(Related question)

Answer 1

I can give you two examples where we use it:

• Automatically registering objects in JMX for remote management. If a class is annotated with our @AutoRegister annotation, we have an aspect that watches for new instantiations of that class and registers them in JMX automatically.

• Audit logging (the gold standard AOP use case). Its a bit coarse but the general approach is to annotate methods that represent some auditable action. Combined with something like Spring Security, we can get a pretty good idea of:

  • who the user is
  • what method they're invoking
  • what data they're providing
  • what time the method was invoked
  • whether the invocation was successful or not (i.e., if an exception was thrown)