[Gambas-user] off-topic: Metaclasses and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)

[Nelson Ferraz]

Some interesting articles from IBM developerWorks:

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February 26, 2003 - Most readers are already familiar with the concepts 
of object-oriented programming: inheritance, encapsulation, 
polymorphism. But the creation of objects of a given class, with certain 
parents, is usually thought of as a "just so" operation. It turns out 
that a number of new programming constructs become either easier, or 
possible at all, when you can customize the process of object creation. 
Metaclasses enable certain types of "aspect-oriented programming," for 
example, you can enhance classes with features like tracing 
capabilities, object persistence, exception logging, and more.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pymeta.html

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August 28, 2003 - Michele and David's initial developerWorks article on 
metaclass programming prompted quite a bit of feedback, some of it from 
perplexed readers trying to grasp the subtleties of Python metaclasses. 
This article revisits the working of metaclasses and their relation to 
other OOP concepts. It contrasts class instantiation with inheritance, 
distinguishes classmethods and metamethods, and explains and solves 
metaclass conflicts.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pymeta2/?ca=dgr-lnxw02MetaClass2

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See also:

Putting Metaclasses to Work by Ira R. Forman and Scott Danforth 
(Addison-Wesley; 1999)

Guido van Rossum's essay, "Unifying types and classes in Python 2.2"
http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html

Guide to Python introspection
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pyint.html

Improve modularity with aspect-oriented programming
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-aspectj/

[]s

Nelson