Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used to solve a number of today's application requirements but can also be intimidating for developers when getting started. A new article by Matt Chapman, AJDT Project Lead, shows how AOP development with the popular AspectJ library can be made easier using the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) plugin.Read Making AspectJ development easier with AJDT
The article shows how the AspectJ editor provides sophisticated functionality to aid the development of aspects, and how the markers and Cross References view show detailed information and support navigation of the crosscutting structure of your application. Incremental compilation improves the efficiency of the development process and the Eclipse Java debugger can still be used as the AspectJ compiler produces regular bytecodes (to set breakpoints in around advice you need to turn off inlining in the AspectJ compiler settings).
AJDT also offers more advanced capabilities beyond the scope of this article including a launch configuration for load-time weaving, an aspect visualization perspective, a crosscutting comparison tool, support for developing and using aspect libraries, and functionality relating to the development of AspectJ-enabled Eclipse plug-ins.
Please visit the AJDT site to find out more,including demos, new features, downloads, and details about the AJDT newsgroup if you have any questions. AJDT is an open source Eclipse.org tools project and is released under the terms of the EPL. See also InfoQ.com/aop