The announcement that the AspectJ and AspectWerkz team are merging is great. I think it is a serious win win for both projects, and more importantly… AOP in general.
I think the merger makes sense for both sides:
What AspectJ gets out of the merger
Top of the list is they get some really smart guys contributing to the new project. There is good work in the AspectWerkz weaver at load/runtime which can be used, and one of the biggest wins is political. There are a group of developers that don’t want to use AspectJ based on the syntax. The fact that it isn’t ‘just Java’. One of the great parts of the merger is that both front ends will be supported. Now developers will have the ability to use the AspectWerkz syntax if they prefer. This has just taken down another barrier to entry.
What AspectWerkz gets out of the merger
The AspectWerkz team has a great product. There are some pieces that they are missing and would like to have. For example, tools: Eclipse/IDEA Plugins, ajdoc, etc. The AspectJ team has several people dedicated to the tools. It is hard to expect Jonas and Alex to work on great tools as WELL as the platform itself. It also doesn’t really make sense for them to reinvent the wheel. Now they don’t have too. They will get to reuse the AspectJ tools, mature backend, and suddenly their development team has grown to include all of the great resources of the AspectJ group. This is a huge win.
The merger has been coming
If you have tracked both projects, you quickly see that the semantics have been getting closer and closer to eachother. Now, there are only a few differences between the core of both projects (semantically). As soon as you get to that point, it is obvious that it doesn’t make sense to compete as you are both so close. Team up and spend time furthering the cause instead of having two sets of tools. Two sets of backend.
The politics
The political side is also interesting. Who would have thought that BEA would be OK with having the project join Eclipse? There are reasons why it makes sense for the project to continue at Eclipse, and they revolve around patent law (remember, the Xerox patent is still out there!)
Read more: AspectJ and AspectWerkz to join forces
