Re: AspectJ and the Plexus core

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 10:47:19PM -0400, Jason van Zyl wrote:
> Questions are good :-) AspectJ has always been designed to handle
> runtime aspects. It is a limitation with the current
> implementation but the design is there. You have to remember who
> we are dealing with.  Gregor Kiczales is one of the leading
> researchers in AOP and has been doing it for years in
> collaboration with many others. But they are a very practical They
> have thought very carefully about the movement toward AOP
> practices. I see many of the tools that have popped up lately as
> "Johnny comes lately"s.

Hehe, makes sense.

> See, I very much dislike the XML tack. You have zero type safety.

Very good point. I missed that one.

> There are tons of them now but I don't think I'll ever be swayed
> from AspectJ.

All good points. I appreciate the feedback; I'll go back and look at
AspectJ again.

For now compiling our aspects in at compile-time (e.g. with maven's
aspectj plugin) will work fine as they will mostly be
application-wide concerns like security or exception handling.

But when it comes to stitching together modules at installation
sites, it'd be awful nice to have plexus around to help out when it
comes to applying them (e.g. against the binary jars before it loads
them, if I understand it correctly).

I'd be really interested in helping out on getting plexus to do such
things, but it'd have to be a short term thing (I don't have any
sort of job stability and hence, indirectly, technology security
right now) that both my employeer and, potentially, graduate school
advisor agree spending time on it would be worthwhile. Runtime
application of aspects in a component environment is a new, cool
enough thing that I might be able to pull it off. Dunno, we'll see.

Would browsing around the current plexus CVS code be a worthwhile
thing? I haven't see all too many commits lately, so I thought
perhaps you were working in a tambora repo and perhaps the
codehaus CVS code is behind or not yet stable or what not.

Thanks,
Stephen