[aspectj-users] It's a whole new genre.... announcing the AspectJ 5 M2 *

[Adrian Colyer <adrian_colyer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Always keen to break new ground, the
AspectJ team are pleased to announce a whole new genre of builds: milestone
candidates. These are just like release candidate builds, except when they're
done they become milestone builds rather than releases :). We believe we've
met all of our objectives for AspectJ 5 M2 and have made available a milestone
candidate build which you can download as:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/ajdt/dev/aspectj-DEVELOPMENT-20050324155000.jar

(this is also linked as the "Last
Known Good Developer Build" from the AspectJ downloads page). 

We're calling it a milestone *candidate*
for two reasons - one is that the auto-build uploading was broken for a
period following some updates to the Eclipse.org infrastructure services,
and hence we haven't had the usual level of user testing over the last
couple of weeks from all the folks who follow our published builds. The
second reason is that Andy & I are both going on holiday (independently!)
for the next week, starting tomorrow, so we won't be here to pick up the
pieces if anything unexpected happens.  If there are no major surprises
when we get back, we'll release M2 proper. 

We're aware that M2 is a little later
than we had originally hoped. The latter half of February and into March
had far too much travel (conferences, consultancy, training etc.) and we
weren't able to absorb it without impacting the schedule. We're operating
a "stay-at-home" policy through April so that we can make a real
injection of progress on M3. Priorities for the M3 release including upgrading
the JDT compiler version to the Eclipse 3.1M6 level, implementing full
generics support for aspect members, and integrating our initial support
for the annotation-based development style as documented in the AspectJ
5 Developer's Notebook. We also have a number of bugs and enhancements
marked as "target 1.5.0 M3" in bugzilla if you're interested
in following progress.

The changes in AspectJ 5 M2 since M1
are numerous, and the highlights are listed below. The AspectJ 5 Developer's
Notebook has been updated to reflect the updates. So many people have contributed
ideas, suggestions, and bug reports to M2 that it's impossible to list
you all - but you know who you are, so thank you. Come 1.5.0 final we'll
put together a roll-of-honor :)

Highlights in AspectJ 5 M2:

* Full source compilation of Java 5
programs (with the "-1.5" option)
* New Xlint warning when advice does
not affect any join points (and the @SuppressAjWarnings annotation to suppress
it) (-1.5 only)
* @this,@target,@args forms changed
from @this(@Foo) to @this(Foo)
* Full support for annotation binding
as context in @this, @target, @args, @annotation, @within, @withincode
* Declare annotation (declare @field,
declare @method, declare @constructor, declare @type)
* Declare soft does not soften runtime
exceptions
* pertypewithin instantiation model
* performance improvements resulting
in reduced compilation times
* aspectpath has been extended to accomodate
directories as well as jar/zip files
* many, many bug fixes

For examples of some of the new features
in action check the following links:

* http://www.aspectprogrammer.org/blogs/adrian/2005/03/hacking_with_ha.html
* http://www.aspectprogrammer.org/blogs/adrian/2005/03/event_driven_ar.html
* http://www.aspectprogrammer.org/blogs/adrian/2005/03/ramnivas_on_ann.html
* http://www.aspectprogrammer.org/blogs/adrian/2005/01/making_concurre.html

and also the AspectJ 5 Developer's Notebook:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/indextech.cgi/~checkout~/aspectj-home/doc/ajdk15notebook/index.html

-- The AspectJ Team