Refactoring: Cross Cutting Concerns workaround

Question

Is there a workaround for implementing cross cutting concerns without going into aspects and point cuts et al.?

We're in Spring MVC, and working on a business app where it's not feasible to go into AspectJ or Spring's aspect handling due to various reasons.

And some of our controllers have become heavily bloated (too heavily), with tons of out-of-focus code creeping in everywhere.

Everytime I sit down to refactor, I see the same things being done over and over again. Allow me to explain:

Everytime I have to prepare a view, I add a list of countries to it for the UI. (Object added to the ModelAndView). That list is pulled out of a DB into ehCache.

Now, initially it was terrible when I was trying to add the lists INLINE to the mav's everywhere. Instead, I prepared a function which would process every ModelAndView. How? well, with more garbage calls to the function!

And I bought out one trouble for another.

What's a design pattern/trick which can help me out a bit? I'm sick of calling functions to add things to my ModelAndView, and with over 3500 lines of only controller code, I'm going mad finding all the glue points where things have gone missing!

Suggestion are welcome. Cross cutting concerns flavor without AspectJ or Spring native.

Answer 1

Since you are using Java, you may consider moving your code to Scala, since it interacts well with Java, then you can use traits to get the functionality you want.

Unfortunately cross-cutting is a problem with OOP, so changing to functional programming may be a solution, but, I expect that in actuality they are using AOP to implement these mixins, so it would still be AOP, just abstracted out.

The other option is to look at redesigning your application, and make certain that you don't have duplicate code, but a major refactoring is very difficult and fraught with risk.

But, for example, you may end up with your ModelAndView calling several static utility classes to get the data it needs, or do ensure that the user has the correct role, for example.

You may want to look at a book, Refactoring to Patterns (http://www.industriallogic.com/xp/refactoring/) for some ideas.