Today we (Jonas and Alex) released the 0.9 release candidate 1 version of AspectWerkz (0.9.RC1).

This new release brings a new innovative Aspect model whose orginal idea came from Ron Bodkin, one of the AspectJ brains. The new Aspects are defined in a single java class, with fields being the pointcuts, methods being the advices and inner classes being the introductions. The Aspects are marked with JSR-175 style metadata (for now as doclets, until java 1.5 is out), and the metadata is incorporated in class file bytecode. The XML deployment descriptor is thus reduced to a minimal piece, and brings Aspect packaging, abstraction and reuse to a new seamless integration state.

The new Aspect model supports all AspectWerkz dynamic AOP features: introduction replacements at runtime, advice replacements and removal. This release provides support for both XML centric model (0.8 style) and Self-defined Aspects.

The cross platform class-load time hooking has also been enhanced to support IBM JRE and BEA JRockit.

We did the choice of releasing a Release Candidate to give our community the ability to provide extensive feedback on all the new features that bring AOP for java a step ahead.

The documentation is all included, with several samples that can be run thru both Ant and Maven.

Jonas gave a talk at JavaPolis/BeJUG early december and the slides announcing this new Aspect model can be found here.

New features:

• Model 2 - self-defined Aspects are one single java class, with regular java inheritance and abstraction. Pointcuts and bindings are defined with doclet metadata that gives today AOP the JSR-175 metadata facilities.


• IBM JRE support IBM JRE bundles a specific class loader. This one is now supported in class-load time weaving hook architecture.


• BEA JRockit BEA JRockit (v7 and v8.1) comes with a JVM level ClassPreProcessor mechanism. AspectWerkz is a pioneer and allows the use class load time AOP on top of this JRockit feature.

Some of the other new things are:

• Fixed issues for field pointcuts, Pointcut algebra has been enhanced


• Documentation updated and reorganized. Many bug fixes.

The new release can be downloaded from here.
The BeJUG slides can be downloaded from here.
The self-defined Aspect model was presented in blogs here.