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December 11, 2004

Early Christmas Presents... Early New Year's Resolution

Yesterday we posted an early christmas present to AspectJ users on the AspectJ site :- the M1 build of AspectJ 5. This represents a significant step on our way to delivering full Java 5 support and more early next year. Do check out our ongoing work on the AspectJ 5 Developer's Notebook which details a lot of the new features.

Then I realised how long it had been since I last made a blog entry.... way too long. So here's an early new year's resolution too: I will blog more often, I will blog more often....

It's not like there haven't been interesting things to write about - Charles Zhang and Arno Jacobsen reported on their work in refactoring middleware using AspectJ at OOPSLA, the ABC team released their AspectJ compiler, we've been doing a whole bunch of interesting language design, JBoss have stepped up to the IDE challenge and started building Eclipse plugin support for their AOP framework, AspectWerkz have put out some great releases, and the list goes on.... At list this will give me some material with which to make good on my new resolution!

A couple of more recent things to highlight. If you haven't seen them, we put up four demos of AspectJ and AJDT that you can watch right in your web browser - these give a great overview of the tools and I encourage you to check them out when you get the chance. AJDT keeps getting better and better. The 1.2.0 M1 release that is out right now has some great enhancements over what's in the demos, and the 1.2.0 M2 that will be coming out real soon (we're not done with those Christmas presents yet) has some really cool features that I'm very excited about.

I asked a couple of weeks ago on some of the aspects lists for folks who were teaching AOP or AOSD courses to get in touch. The response has been great! A big thank-you to all who replied (and if you are teaching a course and haven't yet told me, please do). I plan to collate all the responses and post the list on the AspectJ site (and I believe there's talk of a "teaching AOP/SD" BoF at next year's AOSD conference too). I take this level of activity at both post-graduate and undergraduate level in universities as a good sign, and as an indication to doubters that there is indeed more to AOP than "just another framework." When I graduated from university (I did just scrape through you know ;) ), object-orientation was an optional course in the final year of my degree. Two years later it was being taught in the first year of that same degree course, graduates were leaving universities knowing about it, and we were using it for serious commercial development. AOP is not quite in that position yet, but the signs are encouraging to me.

On the topic of teaching, our book (Eclipse AspectJ) is finally hitting the warehouses this month and will start shipping. We poured a lot of effort into that, and it will be great to finally have it see the light of day. Like many others it seems, I'm off to Belgium tomorrow for JavaPolis to give a three-hour AspectJ tutorial on the Monday. It looks like lots of old friends will be there too and I'm looking forward to seeing you again. After an intensive period of development it's great to get out and talk to some users again.

Posted by adrian at December 11, 2004 07:22 PM [permalink]

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