Using AOP to separate SOA security concerns from application implementation

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that increases modularity by enabling improved separation of concerns. Implementing modern Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) systems requires expertise from people in a variety of roles, including application developers and security experts. Ideally, the application developers should be fully isolated from, and independent of, security implementation. The virtues of AOP offer a practical programming framework in a SOA to ensure the separation of security concerns from both application code and application developers. This paper describes the application of aspect weaving to services in a SOA environment to address these concerns. We demonstrate several methods of aspect weaving to incorporate security code into deployed services, both at compile-time and load-time.