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July 14, 2004

I'm still here, Bill Gates likes AOP, and other stories...

It's been far too long since my last post, so I ought to explain myself. We're coming up to the manuscript delivery deadline for a book on AOP in Eclipse with AspectJ that we're writing with Addison-Wesley. I've been working 12-16 hour days writing in every spare moment, and the last thing I've felt like doing at the end of those sessions is, well, writing about AspectJ again.

Tonight I'm taking a breather :). So much has happened in the aspects world in the last few weeks, that I will use this post just to bring you (and me) back up to date).

Of course there was JavaOne, and the infamous AOP panel. The session was absolutely packed, and got some good coverage in InfoWorld:

"If attendance at JavaOne sessions is any indication of what's on the minds of developer's then aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a technology whose time is coming. At the show on Wednesday a standing-room only crowd numbering an estimated 1,500 people attended at least part of a technical session on AOP, a form of modular development."

I heard that the overflow room was packed too. Gregor gave a brief 10-minute mini-tutorial at the start of the session - so I guess that has to be the world's largest AOP tutorial to date.

Interesting quote from Bill Gates in the press this morning too. Microsoft has always been quiet about their views on AOP, but today Bill Gates is quoted by a reporter from ComputerWorld in NZ.

"...Davidson was more interested in a discussion about developer productivity and code reuse. Gates told the architects that Microsoft would be embracing model-oriented architecture and aspect-oriented programming."

We'll wait and see what that really means - I hope they don't try and claim that attributes on .NET are AOP and cause a lot of confusion. Still, Bill Gates is a smart guy and clearly AOP is making enough waves to get his attention so that can only be a good sign.

The AspectWerkz team put out what looks to be a great new release of AspectWerkz, their 1.0 beta 1. Nice job guys.

One of the side-effects of working on the book is that we've made a ton of improvements in AJDT that will be available in the forthcoming 1.1.11 release - more on that very soon so watch this space, it's our biggest and best release so far by quite a margin.

Rod Johnson's "J2EE Development without EJB" book is finally shipping. I've got my copy on the desk here beside me. Also check out Bruce Tate's "Better,Faster,Lighter Java" - he has some interesting points to make about AOP.

Still busy at work on this - Rod's being doing great stuff in the Spring CVS tree too. Here's what Rod has to say about it in a post on TSS:

"Having said that, I believe that AspectJ is going to become increasingly important as we come to understand the full implications of AOP. So one of the major features in Spring 1.1 is AspectJ integration. This will allow AspectJ aspects to be configured by the Spring IoC container using Dependency Injection, which brings similar benefits to applying DI for classes. Both Adrian Colyer and I are very excited about this, and both Spring and AspectJ teams are working together. Support for the core AspectJ integration is already in Spring CVS and will be released with Spring 1.1 RC1 (probably end of next week). I'm also working on some samples, which will probably be released separately slightly later. The Spring/AspectJ integration opens up some interesting possibilities. Beyond that, we're looking at using AspectJ pointcuts to target Spring AOP advice. This relies on AspectJ changes--they are going to expose an API for Spring and other tools to use at runtime. Another interesting area is implementing Spring services as "native" AspectJ aspects. Thus we'll provide a transaction aspect, probably in the Spring 1.2 timeframe, although I might release it with the samples."

Lots more stuff to talk about - more very soon I promise!

Posted by adrian at July 14, 2004 07:39 PM [permalink]

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