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by Jon Tirsen.
Original Post: Quantum AOP
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Cedric has figured out a name for what me and Rickard (and now Carlos Villela) have been doing: Quantum AOP. It is the process of splitting a class into smaller mixins and reassembling them again to form the actual classes used in the system.
The interesting argument for this is:
One of the assumptions of object-oriented programming is that objects are easily subjected to an Aristotelian hierarchical classification (hence the name class). Unfortunately this is only true to a certain extent but the hierarchical classification is an all or nothing sort of deal. In reality different responsibilities of a class needs to be subjected to different classifications. What 'quantum AOP' (sort of like the name) does is split the class into it's responsibilities and by doing this makes it possible to achieve a higher degree of reuse for each separate responsibility or if you like: quanta.
This could also be done by inheritance-by-delegation or a similar scheme but basically the AOP framework wraps some syntactic sugar around the mechanics of the pattern. An additional task for the AOP framework is to help adding behaviour to other quanta by using advices. Ideally this shouldn't occur but unfortunately this isn't always the case.
We have found this quite useful, experience will tell if it is generically useful. For example, we have all been building a similar system: both Rickard and Carlos a CMS, we a CMS for learning content (due to some quirks in the industry quite a different thing). Experience regarding this in other areas is also needed.
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