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December 15, 2004

AJDT 1.2.0 M2 Released

AJDT 1.2.0 M2 was released yesterday. If you haven't been following the AJDT 1.2.0 release stream, let me tell you that the M1 and M2 releases represent a major step forward for AJDT.

In the true Eclipse spirit, there are excellent new and noteworthy documents that describe the new features and give a graphical overview. Check out the:

• AJDT 1.2.0 M2 New and Noteworthy , and the
• AJDT 1.2.0 M1 New and Noteworthy documents.

In M2, as well as live updating of aspect members in the Package Explorer you also get live updating in the Outline View. You can now use the regular Java editor and Outline View for .java files, and still get to see all of the cross-reference information (advises, advised by etc.) through the new Cross-References View. A decorater marks Java element icons in all of the Java views to indicate the presence of AspectJ relationships for the element (simply click to see them in the Cross-reference).

AJDT is built using AJDT (and hence AspectJ). In this release we've exploited that with a bunch of aspects that give much better diagnostics in the event of a failure. We've also done much more testing on Linux, Mac, and even in the Rational products.

M2 also incorporates the latest AspectJ 5 M1 compiler so you can play with annotations too (and read and search the AspectJ 5 Developers Notebook from within the Eclipse help system). I met Erich Gamma in Antwerp on Monday, and he told me that the Eclipse 3.1 M4 build will contain a fully-featured Java 5 compiler, which means we can start to integrate that into AspectJ straight after the christmas break. I'm excited about that because then you'll be able to compile Java 5 (AspectJ 5) programs with ajc as well as weave Java 5 class files.

Posted by adrian at December 15, 2004 03:51 PM [permalink]

Comments

Hi, Adrian.

I got somewhat confused by the last paragraph: I tried to build java files including annotations but that did not work (compiler denies correct annotation syntax). So what annotation support *is* available then in that build?

Cheers,
Eric

Posted by: Eric Bodden at December 18, 2004 11:50 PM

The AspectJ 5 M1 README details the function in the M1 release. In short, you can use M1 to write pointcuts that match on annotated Java elements (@xxx is supported in type patterns, and also in the new @annotation, @within, @withincode, @this, @target, and @args designators), but you can't compile Java 5 code yet. So you have to compile the Java 5 classes with javac, and then binary weave them weave the AspectJ 5 M1 weaver.

Posted by: Adrian at December 19, 2004 07:58 PM

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