Adrian Colyer, lead on the AspectJ project and one of the main figures in the AOP movement, will be leaving IBM soon to join Interface21, the company behind the Spring framework. This is a major change in the AOP industry, which recently also saw AspectWerkz founder Jonas Bonér move to Terracotta from BEA.

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

He's also prioritizing seamless migration from Spring AOP to AspectJ, should end-user projects require it.

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.

Rod kept this one quiet, even after 6 pints of beer, British beer with alcohol in it, non of that American "Lite" stuff, he just said it was a big name.

Great move, for both Adrian and Interface21.

Well done!

-John-

Does this reflect that IBM is pulling away from AOP?

I don't think you can say that just because Adrian moved on.

Billy

Does this reflect that IBM is pulling away from AOP?

Absolutely not! I'm leaving behind a very strong team that will carry right on working on AspectJ, AJDT, and helping IBM project teams to adopt and apply AOP. As the AspectJ project lead, I'll still be working with them closely in the future too.

IBM is an amazing company for the strength and depth it has in its technical ranks, and the movement of any one individual, whoever that may be, is unlikely to affect IBM's plans or its ability to deliver.

IBM is an amazing company for the strength and depth it has in its technical ranks, and the movement of any one individual, whoever that may be, is unlikely to affect IBM's plans or its ability to deliver.

So no bridge burning then? :-)

-John-

Rod kept this one quiet, even after 6 pints of beer, British beer with alcohol in it, non of that American "Lite" stuff, he just said it was a big name.

I think the scoop goes to the IT@Cork conference on the 6th of this month in Cork, Ireland. Rod announced Adrian's move to the assembled 144 attendees.

I guess that Beamish is better than bitter when it comes to getting at the truth ;-)

Brendan

I talked a bit about this on my blog.

This is good news for AOP and Spring.

I think we will see a lot more wrt Spring helping us get our work done, with truly powerful AOP for the taking.

Good luck to all,

Dion

This is very good news for the Spring community as well increasing the further adoption (and visibility) of AOP into mainstream technologies and products.

About 2 years ago I started working with AspectJ and found it an extremely useful technology transparent introduction of infrastructure services (tracing and auditing being my interest at the time). Adrian was extremely helpful on the aspectj mailing and always listened with great interest to what users wanted to apply the technology too. He likes to engage so this will be a very positive introduction to the Spring community.

<plug>

JInspired has just announced the release of JXInsight 4.0 RC 1 which includes a JXInsight Spring AOP trace extension.
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jdbinsight/downloads/new-in-4.0.html#spring

The JXInsight TraceInterceptor provides high resolution clock counters, JVM statistics including GC time, CPU time, object allocations, thread blocking and waiting per trace interval as well as call stack inspection and classification, and integration into the award winning JXInsight console.

An Insight article has been posted on using this extension with Spring JPetstore:
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jdbinsight/springtracing.html

</plug>

Kind regards,


William Louth
JXInsight Product Architect
CTO, JInspired

"JEE 2 tuning, testing and tracing with JXInsight"
http://www.jinspired.com

I would like to second Dion's opinion that this is great news for both AOP and Spring. Well over a year ago I recall Adrian showing me how natural it was to configure AspectJ aspects via Spring. For many enterprise app developers who want the full power of AOP but with a more accessible and familiar face, the synergy of these technologies is a perfect answer. Adrian's move is assurance that the two will be integrated seamlessly, and that the deeper and longer-term AOP issues will not get the backburner. Interface 21 is getting one of the best minds in the field!

Mik Kersten (AspectJ Committer)