Project Plan For AJDT - AspectJ Development Tools Project, version 2.2.0

Introduction

AJDT released 2.2.0 to coincide with the Eclipse Juno release in late June 2012. In this release of AJDT, there will only be one stream of AJDT that is compatible with both Eclipse Indigo and Eclipse Juno. Pervious releases of AJDT had separate streams for different Eclipse releases. AJDT 2.2.0 will no longer support Eclipse Helios. There will be no more changes to the Eclipse Helios stream unless a critical bug is discovered and fixed. We are planning to release AJDT version 2.2.1 in late 2012 and 2.3.0 for the Kepler release/

Release Deliverables

AJDT includes 6 plugins from two other EPL Eclipse.org projects:

  • The AspectJ project contributes three plugins. These plugins are org.aspectj.runtime , which contains the AspectJ runtime, org.aspectj.ajde , which contains AspectJ support for integrating with a development environment, and org.aspectj.weaver , which contains the AspectJ weaver and compiler.
  • The Equinox Aspects project , part of the Eqinox Incubator also contributes three plugins. These are org.eclipse.equinox.weaving.aspectj , which contains the equinox weaving service, org.eclipse.equinox.weaving.hook , which contains the OSGi framework extension for the weaving service to plug in, and org.eclipse.equinox.weaving.source , which contains Equinox Aspects source code.

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Release Milestones

Milestones and service refreshes will be released as required. Typically, AJDT goes on a 6 month cycle for service refreshes.
2.2.112/05/2012
Service refresh of AJDT

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Target Environments

AJDT 2.2.0 requires Eclipse 3.7, 3.8, or 4.2. As such, AJDT has the same JRE requirements as Eclipse.

Internationalization

English language bundles are available for many AJDT messages, but they have not been translated.

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Compatibility with Previous Releases

ADJT versions are designed to be backwards compatible with older versions of the same stream. However, since different streams run on different Eclipse versions, there is no compatibility between streams, even though the feature sets and APIs are largely the same.

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Themes and Priorities

Our current focus is two-fold: AspectJ 1.7 support, and IDE support for load-time weaving. These themes are generated from user requests in the community. As such, we want to maintain flexibility and put effort into new themes if they are coherently generated from the community.

IDE support for Load Time Weaving (LTW)

Currently, aspects applied to a project through LTW are not visible in the editor in the standard ways that compile time aspects are. These include gutter annotations and entries in the crosscutting view. Because there is no editing support, using LTW can be time consuming and error-prone. We will explore ways to gather and display LTW information to the programmer while editing.

  • Committed

    • [plan] [ltw] aspectj_1_5_0.dtd is missing from aspectjweaver [130134] (target milestone: 2.1.1)

  • Proposed

    • [plan] [ltw] Cannot use concrete-aspect with LTW launcher [131728] (target milestone: 2.1.2)
    • [plan] [LTW] Simplify the creation of aspect bundles [138207] (target milestone: 2.1.2)
    • [plan] [LTW] improvements to load-time weaving tools [260342] (target milestone: 2.1.2)
    • [plan] [LTW] Utilize the reusable Aspect matcher in the weaver bundle to show crosscutting relationships for LTW [265029] (target milestone: 2.1.2)

AspectJ 1.7 support

AspectJ 1.7 will be introducing new language features. AJDT must support them when they are available.

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