Aspect Research Associates (ARA) is a software technology firm founded by Dean Wampler, Ph.D. and based in Chicago. We serve clients around the world.

We believe in Polyglot Programming, combining the best tools, languages, and techniques to build best-of-breed Big Data, Internet, Enterprise, and Mobile applications. We provide mentoring for all the technologies we use and in-house training on some of them.

Our specialties include the following:

  • Big Data Technologies: Dean has spent the past several years working with clients on Hadoop projects, various NoSQL datastores, data analytics, and other technologies. Dean is a widely recognized conference speaker and the coauthor (with Edward Capriolo and Jason Rutherglen) of Programming Hive, published by O'Reilly Media. Hive is a very popular SQL tool for Hadoop.
  • Software Design Paradigms: Functional, Object-Oriented, and Aspect-Oriented Programming. We are big believers that Functional Programming is the way forward for software design, especially for large-scale, highly-concurrent, data-oriented systems. We help clients adopt FP, primarily using Scala, but also applying FP to more traditional languages, such as Java, Ruby, and JavaScript. Dean's book, Functional Programming for Java Developers, is indicative of this pragmatic approach.
  • Language Ecosystems: Scala (Dean is the coauthor with Alex Payne of Programming Scala), Ruby, Enterprise Java, and JavaScript are where we focus our efforts, but we have worked with many languages, always searching for the best tool for the job.
  • Application Frameworks: Akka, Hadoop, and web stacks such as Ruby on Rails.
  • Agile for Large Organizations: XP, Scrum, and Lean, scaled from small teams up to enterprises.

Polyglot Programming and Aspect Programming are our advocacy sites for multi-paradigm and multi-language programming, in general, and Aspect-Oriented Software Development, in particular. You'll find some introductory material and presentations on these and other topics.

We also sponsor the open-source projects Aquarium, an Aspect-Oriented Programming toolkit for Ruby, Contract4J, an AspectJ-based, Design by Contract tool for Java 5 and AspectJ, and Stampede, a flyweight workflow scheduling tool. We contribute to several other GitHub projects as well.

For more information about our services, please contact us.