In object-oriented business support applications, separating business rules from core application functionality is crucial. Essential to business rules are their connectors to the core application, which existing approaches fail to support explicitly. Our paper presents requirements for encapsulating business rule connectors and shows that Aspect-Oriented Programming is necessary to fulfil them. All is illustrated with a small ecommerce example in Java ™ and AspectJ. 1.

The complexity of business domains is steadily increasing and it is becoming more important to explicitly capture business processes and policies as business rules. The Business Rules Group defines a business rule as a statement that defines or constraints some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control the behaviour of the business [3]. Business rules tend to evolve more frequently than the core application functionality, and therefore should

specification of business rules and their