Explore Model Driven Architecture and Aspect-oriented Programming, Birds of a Feather
In recent years, two new trends in software engineering have been established—Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP) was developed to extend and ease programming, and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) was introduced to take full advantage of the power of modeling. Many people are confused when confronted with both AOP and MDA. This article provides a crash-course on both topics and explains the differences and similarities between the two.
by Anneke Kleppe,
Jos Warmer
April 4, 2005
lthough AOP and MDA were developed from very different viewpoints: programming vs. modeling; weaving many inputs into one output vs. creating many outputs from one input, there is a great deal of common ground between them and both techniques are used for identical purposes. There is no need to choose between them. They complement each other and can be used together successfully.
One very positive aspect of both AOP and MDA is that they have brought our attention back to issues like modularization and abstraction; issues that were considered to be very important in the 1980s, but slipped away in the 1990s. You should not forget that the attention to these issues was very fruitful—it was the driving force behind the advent of object-oriented programming and object-oriented modeling, and as such, has brought us the UML. It will be very interesting to see what it will bring us in the 21st century. It may be called MDA, AOP, or it may have a completely different name, but it will no doubt be an important step forward for the industry.
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lthough AOP and MDA were developed from very different viewpoints: programming vs. modeling; weaving many inputs into one output vs. creating many outputs from one input, there is a great deal of common ground between them and both techniques are used for identical purposes. There is no need to choose between them. They complement each other and can be used together successfully. 
