IBM developerWorks has published Matt Chapman's article "New AJDT releases ease AOP development", as part of the peer-reviewed AOP at Work series. In this article, Matt gives a comprehensive exploration of the functionality offered by AJDT, the AspectJ tooling for Eclipse. This is presented using a variety of scenarios, ranging from simple test projects, to more advanced multiple project setups. Also covered are the AJDT changes to support AspectJ 5, and techniques and features aimed specifically at the development of large AspectJ projects.

From the article:

The AspectJ Development Tools for Eclipse (AJDT) have recently undergone considerable changes, mainly to more fully integrate with the Eclipse platform. The changes also provide AspectJ developers with greater access to tooling support on the Eclipse platform. In this article, I'll introduce you to AJDT 1.2 for Eclipse 3.0, which was released in June, and AJDT 1.3 for Eclipse 3.1, which is due for release in September (early development builds are available now).

A great deal has changed since AJDT 1.1, so this article should be of interest both to developers new to AJDT, and those familiar with earlier versions. Instead of repeatedly pointing out exactly what has changed and how, I'll use this article to take a fresh look at the current AJDT functionality and approach.

As series lead, I welcome commentary from the community regarding individual articles and the series as a whole.

Greate news!

Does the new release of AJDT support annotation-based syntax?

As an input for a discussion, what are the pros and cons for annotations versus language-extensions offered by AspectJ? Which one do we believe in the long run?

At the beginning I used to say I love pure Java. JBossAOP uses pure Java syntax for aspects, and that's cool.
But as soon as one starts using introduced members - methods particulary - it's ... ugly in the code.

   ((Persistable)object).takeSnapshot() - is ugly
   object.takeSnapshot() - is a lot better, but requires AJDT and won't compile with 'javac'.

Is it possible to specify aspects with @annotation syntax, but use inter-type-declarations just in the good, old (binary) AspectJ style?

If so, then it's a matter of developer's taste which way he/she chooses, I think.

As soon as I convert PAT to AspectJ5 I will just love to use 'root.takeSnapshosts()'.
But, the way of configuring, specifying aspects doesn't matter really...

Tomasz Nazar

http://patsystem.sourceforge.net/