Making AspectJ development easier with AJDT

Added 31 Jul 2008

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used to solve a number of today's application requirements. The Eclipse Foundation's AspectJ is a popular AOP implementation. However, it can be intimidating for beginning users to get started using the technology. In a new article Matt Chapman, AJDT Project Lead, shows how AspectJ development can be made easier using the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) plugin. More information on AspectJ can be found at InfoQ's AspectJ tag.

If you're doing AspectJ development without using the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT)this article will show you what you're missing. Even if you have used AJDT before, you might see some features you didn't know about.

An increasing number of developers are becoming reliant on the sophisticated functionality found in modern IDEs. Whilst many of us no doubt remember programming in Emacs or Vi (and I bet some of you still do) to some developers features like content assist become indispensable -- if you can't write a modest application without an IDE you're clearly a member of this control-space generation.

Aspect-oriented programming in languages such as AspectJ offers a great deal of power and improved modularity, but without the right tools it could reduce comprehensibility. You can look at some isolated Java(tm) code and gain an understanding at some level of what it's doing, but with AspectJ there may be some advice being applied so you may not see the complete picture. With some crosscutting concerns such as tracing it may be fine to be unaware of the concern, but with security or domain-specific concerns for example they may be a central part of the application. It is therefore even more beneficial to have sophisticated IDE support for AOP compared with OOP.

Throughout this article we'll explore some of the features of AJDT to show how the tools can make you more productive and increase the benefits obtained from an AOP approach.