Closer ties between Spring and AspectJ

[Rod Johnson]

I am pleased to announce that AspectJ lead Adrian Colyer is joining Interface21.

Adrian will remain as AspectJ lead, but will also focus much more on Spring. Adrian and Rob and I are working together to enhance the integration between Spring and AspectJ, and I also expect Adrian to make a significant contribution to Spring AOP.

Some Spring/AspectJ integration features on the way:

- Ability to target Spring advice using the AspectJ pointcut expression language, entirely within the Spring AOP proxy-based model and with no requirement to use the AspectJ compiler

- Ability to annotate objects to enable AspectJ to dependency inject them using a Spring bean definition, even if they are not instantiated by the Spring container

- Ability for Spring to process AspectJ 5 annotations, to provide a subset of the same programming model, again within a proxy-based model.

Note that since Spring 1.1 it has been possible to dependency inject AspectJ aspects using Spring IoC, giving them full access to Spring-managed services.

Adrian is an outstanding technologist, with strong middleware credentials in his 13 years at IBM. I think this is good news for the Spring community and AOP in general.

Rod

[cepage]

Thank God! The end of anemic domain objects! Adrian can't get here fast enough!

[Colin Yates]

Rod, spring just keeps getting better and better.

Thanks guys. Your hard work is *really* appreciated :)

[Rod Johnson]

Corby


Thank God! The end of anemic domain objects! Adrian can't get here fast enough!
Indeed, @SpringConfigured is going to remove the need for the relatively clumsy DependencyInjectionInterceptorFactoryBean. And it won't be Hibernate specific, but will work with any ORM tool, and indeed even for objects created by new.

The development work has basically been done by Rob and Adrian; the only thing holding it back from the Spring core is that it requires AspectJ 5 for annotation processing, and that's not yet (but almost) final.

Rgds
Rod