[aspectj-dev] Themes for AspectJ 1.2

["Adrian Colyer" <adrian_colyer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Now that AspectJ 1.1.1 is out, it's
time to turn our attention to 1.2.  This post is to start a discussion
about possible themes and priorities for the 1.2 release. The eventual
plan will be influenced by AspectJ's users, it's developers, and of course
which items contributors will sign up to implement - so anything we discuss
here should not be treated as a plan commitment at this stage. I'm including
all project tasks, not just those that might involve writing code.

With that said, here are some candidate
themes to start the discussion (not an ordered list):

* AspectJ for the Enterprise

This theme could include adding (and
developing) material for the website / docs / ... explaining how to use
AspectJ with various app servers and J2EE technologies. A classloader would
come under this category too, and perhaps even a set of samples or an aspect
library for working with AspectJ in J2EE.

* Preparation for Java 1.5

Including consideration of the impact
of generics and metadata on the language.

* Performance and scalability

Memory usage (across AspectJ and AJDT),
compile time, weave time, runtime performance. This theme might for example
build a benchmark suite and then use it to optimise the compiler and its
output. Supporting pertype could fall into this category - as it's needed
for some common logging idioms, as could looking into the possibility of
creating thisJoinPoint objects lazily.

* Enhanced IDE support

Work in the ajde components (and possibly
below) to allow deeper IDE integration (e.g. to support eager outline views,
code formatting, structure model operations etc.). JSR 45 support. AJDT
needs this...

* Clean-up : working through P3's etc.
that have built up during release cycle

We have a reasonable list now that we're
going to have to work through. This task will also include things like
fixing up the failing BCWeaver tests

* Miscellaneous (these things don't
fit neatly in any of the above yet)

There are many items carried over from
1.1 planning for example, that we should consider (some may fit into the
above themes). I'll dig these out and post separately. One item I would
like to consider is getting context information into declare warning /
error messages (we had a prototype implementation here in Hursley a while
back but never got to discussing the rights and wrongs on the list as there
were other priorities at the time). Wes has begun work on some general
purpose samples and we should continue that.... there's the possibility
of a general purpose aspect library in time.

I'd like to begin our planning by focusing
on what the right themes are to go after (please cast your votes, and add
your own suggestions too) on the dev list, then we can go to the users
list once we have a first pass in place. Then we have to start fleshing
out what the individual items we want to attack in each category are, and
figuring out who wants to work on what.

-- Adrian
Adrian_Colyer@xxxxxxxxxx