[aosd-discuss] AOP languages mature enough to used in industry

Wed May 16 21:59:05 EDT 2007

On May 16, 2007, at 10:46 AM, Miguel Pessoa Monteiro wrote:

> ...
> Of the tools mentioned in the AOSD Wiki, AspectWerkz, JBoss-AOP and  
> Spring
> are frameworks. As far as I know, Glassbox is an application coded in
> AspectJ.

AspectWerkz merged with AspectJ a few years ago. JBoss-AOP and Spring  
AOP (there's more to Spring than AOP...) are both pure-Java  
frameworks, although Spring now integrates well with AspectJ.   
Glassbox is an AspectJ application.
>
> I'm looking for true programming languages. As far as I know, CaesarJ,
> Eos, JasCo, ObjectTeams/Java (and many others) qualify. The problem  
> is,
> some of those (all?) are still at the proof-of-concept stage.  
> People from
> industry would be reluctant to depend on them.
>
> I'm not aware of a clear definition of "mature language", so that's  
> why I
> talked about adoption by independent developers from industry. I don't
> think CaesarJ meets that requirement, but I could be wrong.

The sticking points for those of us in industry include:
1) The quality of the tool support (IDEs, refactoring, unit testing,  
debugging, ...).
2) How easy it is to learn the language and use it effectively  
(especially for average-quality and new developers).
3) How easy it is to maintain and enhance code written in the  
language for a long time.
4) Winning the political battle of tool choices! You won't get fired  
for choosing Java...

>
>
> Admitedly, it is not an easy thing for a language to reach a level of
> maturity beyond that - just think of what it takes to turn AJDT into a
> superset of JDT for eclipse.

Yes, and unfortunately, it wouldn't make sense for researchers to  
build tools to the caliber of Eclipse's JDT, for example. The support  
of tool providers like IBM has been crucial for AspectJ.

>
> I'm conjecturing that it may be relatively "easy" for some kinds of
> languages (e.g. extentions to dynamic languages such as aspectPHP and
> AspectR) to reach that point. Again, I could be wrong, hence my  
> original
> post.
>
> Pascal suggested a different matter when mentioning ContextL: that  
> some
> languages are so powerful that they do not need to be aspect- 
> oriented to
> handle concerns that would be crosscutting when using other languages.
> Sometimes I hear that Ruby is one such case. That's a very interesting
> topic, but that's not what I'm looking for.

I've been doing a lot of experimenting with aspects in Ruby lately.  
Implementing advice and introductions for individual classes and  
"modules" (like "mixins") are trivial to do in Ruby. It's a bit more  
involved to advising groups of classes and modules in one place. In  
fact, what everyone overlooks is that the most important feature of  
any AOP framework is really the pointcut language. It's hard to write  
a sophisticated pointcut language in Ruby, like most non-AOP  
languages, although Ruby has excellent facilities that help.

dean

>
> Miguel
> -- 
> Miguel P. Monteiro          | cell phone +351 96 700 35 45
> Departamento de Informática | Phone +351 21 294 8536 ext. 10708
> Faculdade Ciências e Tecnol.| Fax: +351 21 294 8541
> Universidade Nova de Lisboa | mmonteiro [at] di fct unl pt
> 2829-516 Caparica, PORTUGAL | URL: http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/~mpm
>
>
>> Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 12:40:46 +0100
>> From: "Eduardo Magno" <emagno at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [aosd-discuss] AOP languages mature enough to used in
>> 	industry
>> To: discuss at aosd.net
>> Message-ID:
>> 	<636f08400705160440q4930a446p2af320e8a46d2986 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Hi Miguel,
>>
>> Take a look at the AOSD Wiki (
>> http://aosd.net/wiki/index.php?title=Tools_for_Developers). Besides,
> although CaesarJ (http://caesarj.org/) is not there I would  
> consider it
> "mature enough".
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Eduardo.
>>
>>
>> On 16/05/07, Miguel Pessoa Monteiro <mmonteiro at di.fct.unl.pt> wrote:
>>> I would like to know how how many AOP languagens exist today that  
>>> can
> be
>>> considered mature enough to be used in real projects. By "mature
> enough",
>>> I mean languages that groups of developers (other than those  
>>> developing
> the language and support infrastructure) deemed stable and robust
> enough
>>> to be used in real projects.
>>> On this base, I would consider AspectJ mature enough, but I'm unsure
> about
>>> otner AOP languages of which I heard about, and there so many of
> them...
>>> Can anyone provide info the others?
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> --
>>> Miguel P. Monteiro          | cell phone +351 96 700 35 45
>>> Departamento de Inform?tica | Phone +351 21 294 8536 ext. 10708
> Faculdade Ci?ncias e Tecnol.| Fax: +351 21 294 8541
>>> Universidade Nova de Lisboa | mmonteiro [at] di fct unl pt
>>> 2829-516 Caparica, PORTUGAL | URL: http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/~mpm
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Eduardo Figueiredo
>> PhD Student in Computing
>> Lancaster University
>> http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/figueire/
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Dean Wampler, Ph.D.
dean at objectmentor.com
http://www.objectmentor.com
http://www.aspectprogramming.com
http://www.contract4j.org

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