Tuesday, December 16, 2003

An awfull backend for AOP vs AspectWerkz (part 1)

(imported from http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/avasseur, read comments there)

Today while having my daily googling time on AOP, I found a 25 pages article about JMangler, a class load time weaving solution I had already bloged about.

The paper is here as a PDF.

I am rather surprised when I read that and mirror it with the fact that AOP would gain from massive adoption. I will defend my position in a very near future, but i could not avoid this flameware snip.

JMangler quotes itself as A Powerful Back-End for Aspect-Oriented Programming. And you might even buy a Prentice Hall book in 2004 to learn that.
I will save your time and money, by explaining you (again) why AOP does not gain from such a low concrete achievement strategy.

Just to let you think about by your own while I am writting my flameware:

  • Will you buy a book in 2004 to learn that JMangler is used in AspectWerkz ? This is false: JMangler had been in AspectWerkz but has been kicked out since july 2003 and we are happy.

  • Have your read that AspectWerkz hooking provides native support for BEA JRockit ?

  • Have you already worked with IBM JRE class loading scheme

  • Should a powerfull solution - that claim to be compliant with J2EE - fail under WebSphere environments ?
  • Should a powerfull solution be SUN JRE 1.4 centric ?

  • Should it hang when used in J2EE architectures ?

  • Should it run only in -Xdebug mode, with two JVM side by side ?



Is that a joke ? Abusing the AOP hype in the Academic sphere ?
Software is a moving thing, and AspectWerkz makes AOP move fast. Be ready.