[ajdt-dev] Minutes of AJDT conference call -13th Feb 2003

["Adrian Colyer" <adrian_colyer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thoughts from Ron Bodkin: (using AJDT under Eclipse 2.0.2 for a consulting
project)

Useful eclipse features that are broken with AJDT:
* refactoring           (needs support from refactoring APIs in Eclipse 2.2
plan)
* organize imports
* generating code (e.g. for overriding)
* debugging

We discussed whether we could get better interim support for debugging
ahead of the JSR 45 support in plan for Eclipse 2.2. For example, we could
make the extra source line information that AspectJ generates switchable -
with it turned off, at least debugging would work as expected for normal
Java classes. We agreed to investigate options.

Could we provide more sophisticated capabilities in .lst files - for
example an exclude filter such as Ant provides?? We agreed that rather than
chasing Ant functionality with .lst support, we should leave the .lst
support as is, and focus instead on improving Ant integration with AspectJ
in Eclipse, so that Ant builds update the structure views etc.. This could
be done e.g. by a facade or replacement ajc ant task that drives the build
through the Ajde layer (wouldn't work for Ant builds that fork, but this
would be an ok restriction, certainly for the time being.)

We discussed how incremental compilation will work in AJDT. With
incremental compilation turned on (the default?), Java classes will be
incrementally compiled, but if an aspect file is saved, a full build will
occur (this is the same behaviour as incremental on the command line).
There will be an option to turn off incremental compilation (AJDT is
probably the first place this new function will be heavily exercised). When
we are happy with incremental support, we should remove the AJ Build button
altogether.

A refresh option on the outline view to discard all in-memory structure
knowledge and then start afresh would be useful for those cases where e.g.
refactoring upsets AJDT.

Status from Mik:

Incremental compilation and structure updates not yet finished... but
coming soon! Promised by Monday evening.

Development plan:

* Create a 2.0.2 version of the plugin based on Mik's drop (1.1b4++) by
next Thursday.  (AMC/ASC)
* Populate help with the HTML content from the AspectJ programming guide
(JW) - longer term, consider adding a target to the AspectJ build to create
this for us automatically.
* Take a checkpoint next Thursday, and then migrate to Eclipse 2.1 M5 by
Tuesday 25th Feb.  We discussed the possibility of using aspect(s) to
encapsulate the 2.0.2/2.1/2.2.x changes so that development can continue to
support all bases as easily as possible.

--Adrian.
Adrian_Colyer@xxxxxxxxxx