techno.blog("Dion")

The use, and development of Annotations will increase the use of AOP

Why do I say that? I think it makes sense from what we are seeing happen.

Right now, if you develop your own annotation, how do you actually DO something with it?

• Suns APT tool (source only? come on.)
• Reflection
• Write a quick Aspect :)

I naturally move to writing a simple Aspect to handle the work for me.

We are seeing these thoughts via:

• Bill Burke and JBoss have pioneered some of this thinking. Have Annotations as a nice way for users to get things done which happen to be using AOP below. And, then allow them to EXTEND using AOP themselves if they need too.
• Adrian’s Event Driven example
• Ramnivas’ thoughts 1, 2, 3
• Sam Pullara also had an example showing just how simple it is to put together a small DSL via a quick annotation and an Aspect, including an @Aspect

Sam also pointed out the similarity between this model, and JView/JDirect from the Microsoft JVM.

/** @dll.import(”URLMON.DLL”, unicode) */

private static native int FindMimeFromData(String prt, String URL, byte[] pbuff, int bufsize, String prop, int dmimeflag, int[] pout, int res);

Wait a minute. Doesn’t this look familiar? :)