TheServerSide at AOSD 2004: Part Two

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IBM endorses AOP: "It is vital for our survival"

Daniel Sabbah, CTO of IBM Software, gave the keynote address at AOSD 2004 today. In my opinion this turned out to be a very important keynote for the AOP community. In the keynote he told everyone how:

• IBM sees AOP as technology is crucial to the companies software growth
• IBM is using AOP "right now" within departments such as WebSphere
• IBM is investing heavily in AOP (specifically, AspectJ, AJDT, HyperJ, CME)
• AOP shows "real value"

It is a really big deal for a CTO of IBM to publically back this technology. If a company as large as IBM can move in this direction, small companies can certainly check it out.

Pragmatic

Daniel's talk came from a very pragmatic standpoint. He discussed the lifecycle of legacy code, and how everything becomes legacy pretty darn quickly. Last years J2EE code is now legacy, just as much as the CICS system.

IBM has huge reuse issues. The transaction core is reused in 129 different applications. DB2 exists in 90+ product offerings. They are using AOSD to be more flexible. "Our middleware has to be able to be flexibility for others", and is intragal for the "On Demand" movement.

Real projects within IBM

Daniel knows that AOP can't be pushed for technologies sake. He detailed projects within the WebSphere realm, and others. IBM has as subsystem "First Failure Data Capture", which captures contextual information with exception catch blocks. AspectJ was used to see if this policy was followed, and the analysis found 355 errors in the System Management system were incorrect (33%), and 17% of the runtime component of WebSphere. This showed real savings.

More analysis has shown many policy infringements in various IBM projects.

Another project was designed to test the scalability of the approach. AspectJ ran against 15k java source files and 90 components. Within this project the build times were reasonable.

Concern Manipulation Environment

Aspects isn't just about code. Daniel explained the notion of taking AO up a level from code. How can we use AO to help with the composition of documentation as well as the other artifacts in a software development project. This is where the Concern Manipulation Environment (CME) comes into play.

The Future

Daniel noted that we need continous improvement in the core technology, and also need to drive use up the software stack. Within a year we will see solution aspects integrated into Rational tools. Finally, he stated that this isn't all a "nice to have", it is about survival.

Enterprise AOP Panel

Ron Bodkin organized a panel on enterprise AOP. The panel consisted of AOP tool vendors such as Bill Burke (JBoss), Jonas Boner (AspectWerkz), and Adrian Colyer (AspectJ). There were also industry practitioners such as Jon Tirsen (ThoughtWorks), and representing academia, Gregor Kiczales ("father" or AOP).

The panel started by letting each member put across their point of view on the state of AOP. Here is a summary of their thoughts:

Gregor discussed how AOP is ramping up. Some people think that adoption isn't as fast as they would like, but Gregor reminded everyone about past technologies. We can not compare the rise of AOP to the rise of Java. Why not? Well, when Java was born most developers already groked it. They knew OOP already, and it was kind of like C++++. With AOP we need to get people thinking in aspects, which is not trivial!

Jonas discussed how AspectWerkz enables fast adoption of AOP in the sense that existing tools do not need to be changed. Since AspectWerkz is just Java, it doesn't break language parsers. He also talked about how currently it can be a pain for implementors to process the bytecode as a stream.... working out where to inject code. The JVM already has this information as metadata, so JVM support seems like the right place for this work.

Adrian reflected on how things have changed even in the last year. Last year hardly anyone was talking about AOP and this year a top executive was stating how it is "critical for our survival". A year ago Adrian was out evangelising AOP within IBM. Today, he is getting more requests that he can handle. Everyone is coming to him asking how AOP can help them out. He also reiterated the point that AOP itself isn't a selling point. The selling point is that it will be used to simplify their enterprise development.

Bill discussed JBossAOP, and how the JBoss vision revolves around pushing the simplicity of POJOs, rather than pushing AOP itself.

"EJB failed ..... at living up to its promises". Jon discussed how he felt Agile methodologies and AOP work together nicely, and that the world of Agile is going to be an important force in the adoption of AOP. The panel then continued to answer questions from the audience. Then got into discussions on what it means to be "AOP", IP issues, AOSD versus AOP, and more.

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