Jun 13 2008 - 
We reworked this website and created an up-to-date
quick-start guide including a "Hello world!" demo. We are looking forward to getting your feedback ...
Mar 10 2008 -
We are pleased to announce the availability of version 1.1.0 of Equinox Aspects ...
Jan 11 2008 - We are pleased to announce the availability of version 1.0.4 of Equinox Aspects ...
Aspect-oriented computing is continuing to increase in popularity. The modularity inherent in OSGi and Eclipse offers unique opportunities for managing and applying aspects by supplying them in bundles and directing their application to particular sets of bundles. This incubator work area is dedicated to delivering an integration of aspects and OSGi.
The goal is to allow developers to use the Equinox together with AspectJ by combining the benefits of both worlds. Using a load-time weaving extension you are able to add AspectJ aspects to your bundle-based system just by putting them into general OSGi bundles. It does not matter if the pointcuts you defined inside the aspects contain join points that are defined by classes within the same bundle or any other bundle in your installation. The load-time weaving extension will take care that your aspects are woven with the appropriate classes at load-time.
To illustrate this lets assume the following situation: You would like to write an aspect that traces something within the JDT plug-ins of Eclipse. Without some kind of load-time aspect weaving you would somehow need to recompile those JDT plug-ins using AJDT (for example) together with your aspect. By using the load-time aspect weaving extension all you need is to implement your aspect and add that bundle to your system. The load-time aspect weaving extension takes care of weaving your aspect with the JDT code as it is loaded. And it doesn't matter if a new JDT is installed by the user later on. The next time your application is started the load-time aspect weaving will take care of weaving your aspect into these bundles as well, if necessary.
With this technology is becomes possible to modularize crosscutting concerns across different plug-ins while keeping the idea of separate compilation for bundles.
Provide Runtime Modularity and Versioning for Crosscutting Concerns: Aspects are used to implement crosscutting concerns. However such concerns usually comprise of interfaces, classes and configurations as well as at least one aspect. OSGi bundles provide an ideal mechanism for packaging and applying crosscutting concerns. Aspects can also provide a new interface to existing functionality: rather than explicitly invoking a security API methods that require authorization can be selected using pointcut or identified using an annotation.
Facilitate the Independent Delivery of Crosscutting Capability: Traditionally AspectJ applications have been compiled and woven at the same time. This produces a complete application with no special requirements other than a dependence on the AspectJ runtime which can be executed on any JVM. However this monolithic approach prevents elements of the application and the aspects themselves from evolving separately. An aspect-enabled OSGi allows an application to be deployed and maintained as a set of components which implement both core and crosscutting capability.
The Aspects incubator uses the main incubator resources with the following refinements.
| Bugs | Summaries start with [aspects] | |
| CVS | Project | Module/directory |
| Eclipse project repository | equinox-incubator/aspects | |
