Aslak Hellesoy's uncommon sense

QDox Attributes

[ Aslak Hellesoy ] 00:55, Friday, 12 September 2003

Can't wait for attributes? Need them now? Check out QDox Attributes! http://cvs.codehaus.org/viewcvs.cgi/qdox-attributes/?root=qdox

Piotr JFDI'ed the long-awaited thing. An easy to use and powerful attributes package for the Java platofrm.

It draws the best from Ara's XRAI, Mark's Attrib4J, Jon's Nanning and Jakarta's Commons-Attributes. All of which failed to deliver a usable product, but (tribute) all contributed to Piotr's new brainchild via their ideas and code.

And if you don't care about attributes - just read the code and doco. It's nice. Very nice. The package scope is even com.thoughtworks even if Piotr is not a Thoughtworker.

This begs for an interview :-)

I looked at it some weeks ago and I have to say that it is a great package. It has one major drawback though (which makes it impossible for me to use it) and that is that it does not compile the attributes into the class, e.g. class/method/field attributes, but into an external file. If this could be solved, f.e. merge with Mark's Attrib4j it would be great.

--Jonas Bonér, September 12, 2003 07:25 AM

Jonas, I absolutely agree. It would be nice to schmack up a compiler/reader that uses ASM to achieve this. And stick it in the metadata section in the class as Attrib4J does.

--Aslak Hellesoy, September 12, 2003 10:20 AM

Somebody really ought to tell me about these feature requests. :-)

ASM does not deal with custom attributes, and there are problems in making it do so reliably. See the thread around http://www.objectweb.org/wws/arc/asm/2003-06/msg00006.html for details. I did consider ripping ASM apart and adapting it to just writing the custom attributes attribute, but this is trickier than it first looks.

Why is an external attributes file a show-stopper for your project, Jonas? You can even combine all attribute files into one combined one for the whole application, which apparently is pretty much what AspectWerkz does right now.

--Piotr Kaminski, September 28, 2003 02:33 AM