Aspect-Oriented Web Development in PHP Jorge Esparteiro Garcia Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto jorge.garcia@fe.up.pt Abstract. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) provides another way of thinking about program structure that allows developers to separate and modularize concerns like crosscutting concerns. These concerns are maintained in aspects that allows to easily maintain both the core and crosscutting concerns. Much research on this area has been done focused on traditional software development. Although little has been done in the Web development context. In this paper is presented an overview of existing AOP PHP development tools identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Then we compare the existing AOP PHP development tools presented in this paper. We then discuss how these tools can be effectively used in the Web development. Finally, is discussed how AOP can enhance the Web development and are presented some future work possibilities on this area. Keywords: Aspect Oriented Programming, Web Development, AOP, PHP 1 Introduction As web applications become more complex, it becomes harder to separate in- dependent concerns. Aspect oriented programming (AOP) [9] paradigm offers various ways to separate concerns which can help us to reduce time and com- plexity of applications. AOP better separates concerns than previous method- ologies (object oriented, procedure, etc.), thereby providing modularization of crosscutting concerns [10]. Despite AOP being a programming paradigm that can be used with the most common object oriented languages, much of the research has been done on devel- oping standalone applications and little has been applied to Web development. Therefore, we believe Web development can be improved using aspect-oriented techniques. AspectJ [8] is one of the most popular AOP proposal tools that offers the possibility to develop web applications using JSP (Java Server Pages). However, nowadays PHP is becoming the most widely used Web scripting. PHP has an edge over locked-in solutions such as JSP and ASP for most Web development work because it is a cross-platform technology. PHP is, nowadays, one of the best and most popular script programming languages for innumerable web applications. Over 20 millions domains on web 1