Alexandre Vasseur, BEA Systems

Alexandre Vasseur works as a Software Engineer at BEA Systems within the Java Runtime Product Group, focusing on Aspect Oriented Technology. He is the co-founder of AspectWerkz, a major open source AOP framework for Java.

Alexandre has been involved in AOP and AspectWerkz for almost 2 years and has been a speaker at AOSD, BEA eWorld and JavaOne 2004. Prior to that, Alexandre worked as a J2EE Senior Consultant at Fortune 500 customers.

Track:   Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition

Abstract:

This session provides an introduction to the concepts of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and aims at explaining how Java 5 Annotations (JSR-175) and AOP can be used together. The session goes through several code samples based on AspectWerkz, a pure Java/XML AOP Open Source framework.

The first part aims at providing a base knowledge on AOP concepts in general, and how those concepts are mapped to concrete Java code, where regular classes enhanced with Java 5 Annotations are turned into aspects. Details are given about the concept of pre-defined Annotations, provided by the framework to define new constructs - just as it is the case for web services (JSR-181).

Annotations can also be user-defined and applied to applications to implement specific behavior, based on runtime access to Annotations. AspectWerkz AOP framework supports matching on those application specific Annotations, providing a strong matching mechanism based on types.

Annotations and AOP are not contenders but complement each other and can when used together be a very powerful tool, that we believe will play a major role in the coming Java development and standards.

The talk concludes with explaining how these concepts can be used today, and how the same functionalities can be used using Java 1.3/1.4 doclet based annotations.