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AspectJ and AspectWerkz

Posted by daniel on January 20, 2005 at 1:37 PM EST

Joining forces to battle cross-cutting concerns

In Also in Java Today , Russell Miles blogs that AspectJ and AspectWerkz join forces to further AO. He thinks "this is great news, not just for AspectJ/AspectWerkz developers but for the aspect-oriented community in general. But what are the challenges? This is the first major merger of two AO communities and so can they learn from difficult mergers in the past, or will they benefit from successes such as the UML when modeling approaches were harmonized?"

If you didn't see the announcement - here is an excerpt:

The AspectJ and AspectWerkz projects have agreed to work together as one team to produce a single aspect-oriented programming platform building on their complementary strengths and expertise. The first release from this collaboration will be AspectJ 5, which extends the AspectJ language to support an annotation-based development style in addition to the familiar AspectJ code-based style. AspectJ 5 will also provide full AOP support for the new Java 5 language features. It will continue to be developed as an open-source project on Eclipse.org.

Following the AspectWerkz 2.0 release, the AspectWerkz developers will be joining the AspectJ project to bring the key features of AspectWerkz to the AspectJ platform. This will begin with an extension to the AspectJ language to support an annotation-based style of development, and with tighter integration of load-time weaving for AspectJ in the J2EE environment. A smooth migration path for existing AspectWerkz users is a key priority in the development and release planning.

I don't yet use AOP and from surveys we have done, many of our readers don't yet either. So for me this developmental "join point" seems to be a good thing. Merge the implementations of aspects and work out the kinks before the slope steepens in the adoption curve. Take advantage of the experience of both AspectJ and AspectWerkz, and even throw in what was learned from HyperJ. Encourage tooling to take advantage of a single implementation of AOP and sit back and wait for wide adoption.

I have been getting email from people on the AspectWerkz side of the fence who are not so thrilled about this merger. I started to make arguments about the benefits of a single implementation and the risks involved with sticking with the less popular platform - but then I looked at the book I'd just finished (Revolution in the Valley) and realized that I've been working on a computer with less than 3% of the market share for years and would be horrified if those arguments were applied to my Macintosh. I'm sure that those who use the AspectWerkz framework feel just as personally about their choice. As an outsider, I think it's great that IBM and BEA are working to unify the world of Aspects. I can, however, empathize with insiders who feel they may be losing something as well.

John Reynolds asks Certification or indoctrination in today's Weblogs . He writes "I've never taken any of the Java exams. I've looked them over and taken the practice exams, but I've never expended the effort to buckle down and get serious." John, I agree with you. I've never taken them either. I wanted to take the Developer exam because that looked like fun. You actually code up a project - but I was unwilling to take the Programmer exam first. I think the team writing the current exam made great progress in the right direction, but there is still remnants of the old-style questions.

Alex Winston writes about Functional objects made easy with tiger. " After reading CrazyBob's article about sudo closures in java some time ago I made it a point to familiarize myself with this particular idiom as well as others that are often talked about but rarely used within the java community. Unfortunately some time passed and as most things this todo slipped my mind until I stumbled upon this article. "

Daniel Brookshier reports on Chinook, a peer-to-peer (P2P) bioinformatics service (using JXTA ), from the incubator at Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) of java.net.

In Projects and Communities, James Duncan Davidson blogs on the Amazon Developer Conference and lists the speakers (including James Gosling) and provides links to their talks and notes. The developer team has permission to blog notes on the talks in real time and are doing so.

The JDDAC Community is collaborating on a project to monitor water quality in San Francisco Bay with partners San Francisco State University and the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies. The NetBEAMS project is Building Networked Bay Environmental Assessment and Monitoring Stations.

Bino George responds to a question about patch turnaround time in today's Forums. "We will do our best to keep the turnaround time to a minimum. Of course, we have to submit the code to our internal process of reviews and testing before it is integrated."

PDoubleya suggests Support structured text in JavaDoc. "You'll either love it or hate it. JavaDoc is a great, simple way to document classes, but the use of HTML markup means that for complex method/class documents, including code samples, links and formatting, the JavaDoc content itself is hard to read when working in an editor. Within a browser, it's fine--it's just that within an editor, the tags are rendered as text, so they add visual clutter."

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Joining forces to battle cross-cutting concerns
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