Develop Aspect-Oriented Java Applications with Eclipse and AJDT

By Matt Chapman, Dr. Helen Hawkins
2005-05-16


Conclusion
Whilst a number of more advanced topics were beyond the scope of this article, we hope you now have a good feel for the nature of the support AJDT offers for aspect-oriented programming with AspectJ. As you have seen, the crosscutting nature of your aspect-oriented applications is surfaced by the tools in several ways, from the Outline view and markers on the side of the editor, to the powerful Visualization perspective, which gives you a higher-level view of your application.

AJDT has improved in a number of ways fairly recently (see the new and noteworthy lists for the recent 1.1.11 and 1.1.12 releases for more details), but the extent of the challenge in this area means that there is still plenty of room for further enhancements. Experimental work has been underway on a project known as Lancaster,, which has been investigating ways of achieving much closer integration with the JDT. This will enable more complete functionality in areas such as code completion, formatting, searching, browsing, refactoring, and surfacing the structure of aspects in the Package Explorer and other views. Recent progress on this has been good, so watch out for the first 1.2.0 beta release in the near future. The aim here is to put AJDT firmly on a par with the JDT. Beyond this the focus will be on developing new functionality to enable you to learn and exploit AOP even more, with capabilities such as a pointcut wizard and support for aspect-specific refactorings. There is much to look forward to!.

Finally, AJDT is an open source project, and thus it relies on people getting involved in a variety of ways, from users giving feedback and raising bugs and feature requests to developers submitting patches. If you'd like to get involved, please go to the AJDT Web site (see Resources) and look for the links to Bugzilla, the newsgroup, the developers mailing list, and the page of to-do tasks.

Tutorial Pages:
» Updated tools make AOP easier for beginners and veterans alike
» Installing AJDT
» First steps
» The Outline view and editor markers
» The Spacewar example
» Build configurations
» Aspect Visualization perspective
» Debugging
» Generating documentation
» Further options
» Conclusion
» Resources


First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

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