Palo Alto Research Center and Eclipse announce release of
AspectJ to the Open Source Community

• Eclipse Project Forms To Make DARPA Funded Software Available for Enterprise Java Developers

Palo Alto, CA, March 18, 2003- The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Eclipse announced the transfer of AspectJ™ technology from PARC to Eclipse and through the Eclipse Technology Project, to the entire open-source community. AspectJ has an active following in both the research and industrial communities, and represents a well-researched toolkit for Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).

Jim Hugunin, a PARC researcher who led the original development work on AspectJ said, "We are pleased that the Eclipse community will continue to enhance and refine the AspectJ code. Together, we are working hard to get the next release out and welcome broad community support."

"Eclipse and the Eclipse Technology Project are delighted to become the new home of AspectJ," said Dr. Brian Barry, who leads the Eclipse Technology Project. "AspectJ represents an outstanding example of new approaches to improving the developer experience and software productivity that have been enabled by reusing core elements of the Eclipse Platform."

The most recent release of AspectJ builds on the Eclipse Java™ Development Tools (JDT) framework that is proving to establish a successful synergy between the Eclipse and AspectJ movements.

AspectJ provides a Java language extension and toolset that allows developers to better deal with problems that occur in large software systems by separating out and centralizing solutions for crosscutting issues. Some aspects of system implementation, such as logging, error handling, standards enforcement and feature variations are notoriously difficult to implement in a modular way. The result is that code is tangled across a system and leads to quality, productivity and maintenance problems. Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) enables the clean modularization of these crosscutting concerns. The AspectJ Development Tools project provides Eclipse platform based support for AOSD that seeks to deliver a user experience that is consistent with existing Java Development Tools (JDT).

Distributions of open-source projects managed by Eclipse are available under the Common Public License. This license permits commercial works to be made of the distributions royalty free. The Open Software Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/) has certified the CPL.

The US Department of Commerce Advanced Technology Project funded the original work on Aspect Oriented Programming. In addition, DARPA - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -funded the early development work of AspectJ at PARC and the community building costs associated with it. PARC wishes to thank both agencies for their support.

For more information about AspectJ on Eclipse, please go to: http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/.