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Re: [cinjug-users] Looking for AOP framework

To: "Witt, Mike (OH35)" <mike.witt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [cinjug-users] Looking for AOP framework
From: Eric Galluzzo <egalluzzo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 10:58:29 -0400
Cc: users@xxxxxxxxxx
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Witt, Mike (OH35) wrote:

I'm planning to spend some time experimenting with AOP.  I'm wondering if a
de facto AOP framwork is emerging.  Right now, I'm looking at AspectJ and
Spring, there are probably others as well.  So, I'm looking for an opinion
on which framework to use based on:

- What's the standard


Standard? There is no standard -- at least not yet. At this stage, you'll probably have to use popularity as a criterion instead. I believe that AspectJ is the most established AOP framework presently. An up 'n' coming one, though, is dynaop (https://dynaop.dev.java.net/). It's gaining a lot of "mindshare," or whatever the trendy word for people having heard of a product is.

- Which one is the most newbie friendly - available documentation and
tutorials


As for documentation and tutorials, I don't really know. I think most all of them have "good enough" documentation to get one started. I think the main problem is getting into the AOP mindset, since it's quite different from the "plain" OO mindset. (I certainly haven't gotten there yet.) As far as I can tell, most of the frameworks have comparable feature sets (with minor differences), although they implement those features in different ways. I kinda like dynaop's approach: they use JSR-175-style metadata comments in regular Java code to implement aspects. This means that you can use your existing tools and augment them if desired with aspect-related functionality. That sounds like a fun AOP project, actually. :)

- Eclipse plug-in support


AspectJ now lives under the Eclipse umbrella, so they probably have the best (most integrated) Eclipse support.

- Hibernate support


Not sure what you want here. Hibernate is an existing library; how would aspects "support" hibernate, except for in the generic sense that they would support any type of library?

- Most active development community


Not sure on this one either. AspectJ is probably the biggest, most established project. However, this may be because some of the other projects achieve the same functionality in much less code.

   - Eric


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