AspectJ and AJDT Promoted to Eclipse Tools Project

Posted by Alexandru Popescu on Sep 20, 2006

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Development,

Architecture & Design

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AOP ,

Java

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AspectJ ,

Eclipse

AspectJ and the AJDT (AspectJ Development Tools) projects have now moved from being Technology projects to become Tools projects.  AJDT lead Matt Chapman told InfoQ that the move "is a significant milestone in AspectJ's history, and reflects the maturity and popularity of both the language and the Eclipse IDE support."

Despite having over 20,000 downloads a month, an active user list (100+ posts a month) and wide adoption (particularly with Spring), up to now the AspectJ projects were part of the "Incubators Stream" in the Eclipse Technology project, which is (according to the charter) for the "incubation of small-scale, innovative platform and tools projects."

The move to the Tools project takes AspectJ out of incubation; the Tools project at Eclipse is for "developing a wide range of exemplary, extensible development tools".  According to Matt:

Existing tools projects include the hugely popular CDT and GEF projects and many tools projects are included in products built on top of Eclipse. As a tools project we also have the opportunity to be part of the "Europa" Simultaneous Release (the 2007 version of this year's "Callisto").

On what's upcoming in future versions:

Coming soon is AspectJ 1.5.3 + AJDT 1.4.1 which includes support for building AspectJ-enabled plugins in an Eclipse PDE build process, and enhances the tool support for weaving across projects in Eclipse. In addition we will be putting AspectJ 1.5.3 into versions of AJDT for older versions of Eclipse. Beyond that we're working on and thinking about support for Java 6, enhancements for load-time weaving, and participation in Java refactorings in Eclipse.

AspectJ began it's life at Xerox PARC and moved to Eclipse in 2002, when AJDT was also created. AJDT provides IDE support for AspectJ, closely integrated with JDT, PDE, and the rest of the Eclipse platform.  In the last couple of years AspectJ became tightly aligned with the Spring framework, with AspectJ lead Adrian Colyer joining Interface21. Spring 2 can read AspectJ annotations and AspectJ compiled apps can leverage Spring IoC facilities, using the two together you can inject dependencies into domain objects.

1. Back to top

   Intellij Idea

   by Corby Page

   IntelliJ needs to get their act together on AspectJ support. I do not want to have to switch IDE's.

   Reply

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   Re: Intellij Idea

   by Alex Popescu

   AFAIK IntelliJ 6.0 will support the Eclipse compilera and I think is a good start. Also, with the introduction of annotation-based aspects, things are already a bit easier when speaking about differnt IDEs.
   
   ./alex
   --
   :Architect of InfoQ.com:
   .w( the_mindstorm )p.
   Co-founder of InfoQ.com

   Reply

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   Congratulations

   by Rod Johnson

   Congratulations to Matt and the AJDT team. The AJDT functionality is very impressive, especially the cross-referencing and visualization features.

   Reply

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   Congratulations

   by Jonas Bonér

   You are doing some really high-quality work over there in Hursley. Keep up the good work. AJDT is impressive nowdays. Congratulations to Matt and his team.

   Reply

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