Re: [aspectj-users] Export an aspectj enabled feature.

["Andy Clement" <andrew.clement@xxxxxxxxx>]

hi John,

I can comment on a couple of things - I don't do much plugin
development myself at the moment so will leave others to comment on
the first problem.

On 28/11/2007, Johan Haleby <haleby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have a feature which includes a lot of Eclipse plugins that I want to
> export, some of which are aspectj projects. I have declared the aspects in
> two separate Eclipse plugins/bundles. In one particular case I have an
> AspectJ project that contains a single abstract aspect and I'm creating the
> concrete implementation in subclass in another AspectJ project. It is this
> aspect that I want to be woven into two of my other Eclipse projects. I've
> aspectj enabled these two projects as well and the bin folders of both the
> abstract and concrete aspect are added to the inpath of these projects. This
> works fine in my Eclipse development environment, but when I'm exporting the
> project and want to run it in a clean Eclipse installation the two aspectj
> plugin projects does not show up under "About Eclipse SDK Plugins" and my
> project doesn't seem to work. I've tried creating and exporting a feature
> and I've tried the "Export deployable plug-ins and fragments with AspectJ
> support" option but it doesn't seem to work. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm
> using Eclipse 3.2 and AJDT 1.4.2.

> Another (possibly stupid) question that I have is regarding the
> org.aspectj.runtime dependency that are added to the AspectJified projects.
> Does this mean that my target Eclipse version need to install AJDT as well?!
> Why should this be needed if I use compile-time weaving? As I understand it
> my Eclipse plugin should not have to be dependent on AspectJ when deployed
> if using compile-time weaving since this only changes the byte-code. Or am I
> missing something trivial?

If doing compile time weaving, the woven code produced will have a
dependency on the small runtime library aspectjrt.jar - this is
packaged inside the org.aspectj.runtime plugin.  The choices would be
to put the runtime jar directly in the plugins that have been woven,
or ensure the target environment has the org.aspectj.runtime plugin -
this wouldn't need a full AJDT install as the runtime plugin is a
small fraction of AJDT.  I'm not sure how the export-plugin-with-aj
support does it - whether its the first option or the second.

> A third question that I have is if you can disable to automatic weaving
> performed by AspectJ in my development Eclipse platform? Right now every
> time I hit ctrl+s aspectj weaves basically all my plugins which takes a lot
> of time if you're just making really small changes.

You can turn off Build Automatically for your project.  The problems
with incremental compilation exist when you have a mixture of projects
in the workspace - some AJ and some Java, and there are dependencies
amongst them.  If they are all aspectj or all java then it will behave
much better.  If they are all AJ then a tiny change in a file will be
compiled/woven quickly (sub-second).  The project state for a Java
project is a bit of a black box to us in AJ land so we haven't yet
done the necessary to open it up and examine it - which will enable
AspectJ to be more intelligent in terms of incremental compiles.

Andy