[ajdt-dev] Initial uses of aspects in Vancouver

["Adrian Colyer" <adrian_colyer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sure we'll uncover lots of occasions
where AspectJ constructs can give us better modularity in the design and
construction of Vancouver. Here's a brain dump of the ways I want to use
it straight off the bat:

* Exception Handling: per Chapter 20
of "Contributing to Eclipse" (henceforth "CtE"). We
can write a policy aspect that displays a dialog for all CoreExceptions
within the cflow of a user initiated action, and the simply logs all problems
occurring outside of that.

* Plugin instrumentation (CtE ch. 21).
Use the built-in .options file mechanism in place of the AJDTEventTrace.
Have one aspect for each trace option supported.

* Encapsulation of Interface implementation.
Where we have classes implementing interfaces (and their sole responsibility
is not just to implement the interface), let's use the Encapsulated Interface
Implementation pattern (inner aspect of the class) to keep this modular.

* To test our exception handling, we
will use aspects for simple fault injection.

* To extend our ability to test UI components,
we can use advice on user interface widgets to count and verify their creation
etc. 

* ... more to follow.


-- Adrian
Adrian_Colyer@xxxxxxxxxx