One of the most exciting side effects of having AspectJ and AspectWerkz merge is that it allows us to move to an area of AOP which I am more passionate about.
Until recently, there has been a lot of work in the core AO platforms. As developers we were chosing between AspectJ, AspectWerkz, JBoss AOP, dynAOP, Spring AOP, etc.
While it was great to have a lot of innovation that these various frameworks bring to the table, and they all helped out the movement, I am hoping that AspectJ 5 will become the major choice for serious AOP development. This isn’t to say that there will not be a need to use the others. I use Spring AOP in my Spring projects. I would use JBoss AOP if I was working on the JBoss platform, etc. However, for projects that get deep into AOP in 2005, I think the majority will use AspectJ 5.
There is one item missing in AspectJ 5. It is time to move from the platform, to the libraries. With AspEn we wanted to create a standard set of enterprise aspects in library form. Our first work was for AspectJ (and is used in aTrack), and we wanted to port this over to AspectWerkz next. They had started their own effort as AWBench. (Spring obviously has a lot of practical solutions as well).
So, at the AOSD 2005 conference in Chicago, I am hopeful that people will get together to work on a great thing:
AJSE: Standard AspectJ Library
AJEE: Enterprise AspectJ Library
These libraries will take us to the next level, and will give users what they want. Aspects which allow you to do the things you want to do (credit where credit is due… JBoss is right about that!).
