AspectWerkz Extensible Aspect Container

The last couple of years the Java AOP landscape has flourished. It has gone from one single implementation (AspectJ), to a whole bunch of frameworks, each one with its own way of defining and instantiating its aspects and with its own weaver, runtime environment and tools. Even though having many ways of doing things is not necessary a bad thing, especially not in such early days of a new technology, it is not making it easier for new users of AOP and does not speed up its adoption.

When you look at most frameworks out there you can see that they have a lot in common, most of them share same semantics, life-cycle options etc. Most of them have re-implemented concepts introduced by AspectJ and in some cases introduced their own.

This is something that we have had in mind when we were designing the new AspectWerkz container and weaver and led us to an open architecture that was easy to extend, an architecture that formed the foundation for the AspectWerkz Extensible Aspect Container.

Basically it allows you to plug in extensions that can handle the framework specific details, while the common things are shared. What this brings you is a weaver and a container that can weave, deploy and run any aspect no matter how it is implemented and defined.

This introduces many advantages and opens for standardization on tools (development and runtime manageability).

Read more about this in the TSS article