We're excited to announce a significant development for AspectJ, AspectWerkz, and the world of aspect-oriented programming.

The AspectJ and AspectWerkz projects have agreed to work together as one team to produce a single aspect-oriented programming platform building on their complementary strengths and expertise. The first release from this collaboration will be AspectJ 5, which extends the AspectJ language to support an annotation-based development style in addition to the familiar AspectJ code-based style. AspectJ 5 will also provide full AOP support for the new Java 5 language features. It will continue to be developed as an open-source project on eclipse.org.

Following the AspectWerkz 2.0 release, the AspectWerkz developers (Jonas Bonér, Alexandre Vasseur) will be joining the AspectJ project to bring the key features of AspectWerkz to the AspectJ platform.
This will begin with an extension to the AspectJ language to support an annotation-based style of development, and with tighter integration of load-time weaving for AspectJ in the J2EE environment. A smooth migration path for existing AspectWerkz users is a key priority in the development and release planning.

The combined strengths of the two teams will enable us to deliver a more comprehensive technology suite more quickly than either team could alone. We believe that the backing of two major vendors and an even larger open source community formed by bringing together existing AspectJ and AspectWerkz users will accelerate the adoption of AOP in the enterprise.

Please see the announce document at http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj for more details including outline development plans and an FAQ.

Jonas Boner (AspectJ 5, AspectWerkz), and Adrian Colyer (AspectJ 5, AspectJ)