more on aspects

I did more experimentation with aspectj today. I really dig the idea, but I'm hesitant to recommend something where there is a large compilation time impact, or runtime impact. Yesterday I used the eclipse dev tools for aspectJ. Pretty neat, but the additional compile time seems a bit heavy. So, I moved to try the LTW- the weaver piece, that allows you to add advice to classes as the classloader loads them. Theres lots of docs on this on the web, but here's some notes that might help.

1. Seems if you're using the eclipse aspectJ tools, having a seperate project for the aspects is the best way to set things up. Then, when you change the aspects, just export the jar into your web-app\lib directory.

2. You'll need to customize the aop.xml file some. Heres mine. Basically you make a directory in your "jar" project called META-INF, and create a file called aop.xml. The aspect j weaver will read this, and now what aspects to "weave" in. Mine is later in this document.

3. When you run your classes(a unit test perhaps), you'll need to add the following stuff. I was just using eclilpse, so tomcat or appserver setup would of course be different.
Notable JVM args:

-- if you want to override the default aop.xml file locations:
-Dorg.aspectj.weaver.loadtime.configuration=myclasspathplace/aop.xml;foo/bar/aop.xml

-- this will give you info as to the parsing of the aop.xml file

-Daj.weaving.verbose=true

finally, in order to do the LTW:
-javaagent:./lib/aspectjweaver.jar -Xmx256m

Note I added the JVM args as I was running out of memory. I also had some wierd errors when I first started, and had to upgrade my aspectweaver.jar, from something newer than 1.5.2. Basically a null pointer exception in the weaver...


So, here are the issues:
The weaving adds about 30 seconds of additional startup time, even with the many exclusions below. Note that my advice doesn't do a whole lot.

Unittest (200 tests) time w/out :45 seconds
With weaver was about 75 seconds
With compilation time (non LTW) about 44 seconds.

Maybe later this week I'll now tell spring about my aspects...
At the moment I'm not sold on using aspects in daily development. Maybe as part of an automated build it would be okay, but that kind of limits what I would do with them in the first place it seems.