Adrian is a senior tech staff member at IBM, worked on the AspectJ Eclipse plugin, and has worked with teams around IBM on adoptiong AOP strategy.
Adrian will still be leading the AspectJ project while at Interface 21, such as setting direction, correcting bugs, planning, etc. While at Interface 21, his focus will be on Spring AOP, contributing to Spring core, and making sure that there is tight integration between Spring and AspectJ, such as:
- the ability to use AJ's pointcut language in Spring, and delegate to AJ for pointcut matching and parsing
- the ability to use the AspectJ weaver to do some proxying
- foster the writing of some AJ aspects that will let users use Spring features like transactions
Adrian has been evangelizing the notion of transparent, lightweight middleware using aspects (under various names) at IBM for years, and is ready to go out and make this vision a reality for the world. "Working with the Spring guys is the absolute right place to do that... What I really like in the Spring framework is their pragmatic, simple approach to life. There has been and will be a lot of hype and noise around Aspects, and Spring's let's just do what works message is a good pragmatic one [to realize that vision]."
While Adrian didn't really have any reason to leave IBM, he is serious about evangelizing the Aspects vision and Spring was a better place for him to do that. "There comes a time when being smaller you can move faster. Particularly when it comes to innovation in programming models...a smaller company is a bit freer to do that, especially based on open source."
There will be no dramatic changes planned to AJ or Spring as a result of Adrian's move. The AspectJ 5 milestone 3 release has just been put out, and AJ 5 final will be early October.
Adrian's move to Spring is definitely a strong endorsement of Spring and Spring's importance in the AOP community.