Jonas Boner has written about the BEA sponsorship of AspectWerkz, and how JRockit comes to play: "Our primary objective is to make AspectWerkz the leading AOP framework for dynamic AOP, and to ensure that the JRockit JVM is far and away the best Java platform for AOP."

"We are, of course, working on a number of interesting future directions tight to the in tight coordination with the rest of the BEA products line, but the near term goals are to build deep and unprecedented support for AOP, including real-time run-time weaving into JRockit Java Virtual Machine, and to make AspectWerkz on top of JRockit the number one choice for dynamic AOP in enterprise application environments."

Read BEA sponsors AspectWerkz

He then goes on to talk about the most recent re-work of AspectWerkz, and the new features included.

"AspectWerkz has gone through a lot of changes, the whole core engine has for example been thrown out and replaced by a much more flexible and performant one. The join point model is much more expressive and orthogonal we have also implemented a JIT compiler that is making AspectWerkz much more performant. On top of that we have a new implementation of true runtime weaving, which allows you to redefine your aspect model including adding new pointcuts at runtime."

Read Next generation of the AspectWerkz AOP framework is released

I look forward to meeting Jonas at the AOSD 2004 conference in London next week!

Are there any AOP frameworks that use Tiger's java.lang.instrument package?

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/instrument/package-summary.html

http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/991

We have it but not in the CVS yet, since Java 1.5 brings much more than java.lang.instrument (e.g. metadata) and we might have a specific release for Java 1.5 instead of the current ones that are java 1.3 - 1.4 - 1.5 compliants.

The java.lang.instrument class load time transformation facilities where implemented since 0.8 of AspectWerkz (summer 2003) through a dedicated architecture, with some JRockit specific modules as well (http://aspectwerkz.codehaus.org/online.html)

Alex - AspectWerkz

It's very nice that AspectWerkz has so nice features. But I think that IDE intergation feature is really needed. For example running natively under most popular IDEs would be vival feature for all who new to AspectWerkz (For example, AspectJ has it therefore I don't really care about new language or something else because I know that IDE will help me if I do a mistake).

But I think that IDE intergation feature is really needed.

One difference between Aspectwerkz and ApsectJ is that Aspectwerkz does not add keywords to the language. It uses plain Java and XML to define aspects so it doesn't need to supply the same level of IDE integration. AspectJ on the other hand must provide IDE integration because it does not appear to an editor or compiler to be valid Java code.

I suppose what you really want is to be able to preview your aspects whilst you are still in your IDE. You could so this with Ant tasks, Aspectwerkz provides an Ant task for off-line mode compilation and you could use other Ant tasks/IDE features to preview on-line mode (I know Eclipse can you external programs and capture the input in the console window).

Boner?