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January 21, 2005

Even more AspectJ goodies...

It's been a good week for AspectJ. We posted the first developer build to include full Java 5 compilation support, and finally managed to announce that the AspectWerkz team would be joining with us to work on AspectJ 5 together. I also got some more good news in the post yesterday and on the AspectJ mailing list today.

Copies of Russ Miles' new book, the AspectJ Cookbook, and Ivar Jacobsen and Pan-Wei Ng's book, Aspect-Oriented Software Development with Use Cases both arrived at my door yesterday. Obviously I haven't had time to read them both yet, but I like what I see on a quick flick-through.

Starting with the cookbook, it looks to be very complementary to the other AspectJ books out there (including our own). You won't find an in-depth overview of the language features, instead you get a bunch of really practical tips and ideas you can use straight-away. A quick peek at the contents of chapter 3 should give you an idea of the difference:

• 3.1 Deploying a Command-line AspectJ Application
• 3.2 Deploying an AspectJ Application as a Fully Contained Executable JAR File
• 3.3 Deploying a Java Servlet that uses AspectJ
• 3.4 Deploying a JSP that uses AspectJ
• 3.5 Deploying an Axis Web Service that uses AspectJ

You get the idea. The book also includes AspectJ implementations of 22 design patterns. Can't wait to get stuck in!

The use cases book looks great because it's the first time anyone has tackled in book form the question of how aspect-oriented ideas can fit in with design methodologies. The code examples in the book all use AspectJ, but the ideas apply to implementation in any aspect-oriented language. For those of you who've not seen any of Ivar's papers on the topic, the basic idea is that a use case is a single conceptual entity in the design, and yet the typical implementation of a use case ends up scattered across many parts of a system. Step forward aspects to enable modular use-case implementation. The book uses a single real-world example of a hotel management information system to demonstrate how all the ideas can be used in practice. I expect this book, and others like it, to spearhead the move of AOP into the areas of AOD and ultimately AOA. it's a great contribution to the field.

If two new books isn't enough for you, Gerard Davison has also announced the release of a new version of the AspectJ plugin for JDeveloper. There's a great streaming demo on the site that shows the tools in action - check it out! Gerard says future versions will focus on the integration of AspectJ 5 - cool :)

There's just a fantastic community surrounding AspectJ and AOP in general at the moment. A huge thank-you to everyone involved, collectively we can really make a difference...

Posted by adrian at January 21, 2005 06:42 PM [permalink]

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