What's aopalliance all about? And why is guice using it?

Question

I'm using guice for dependency injection with aop from aopalliance. I can't quite figure out what's aopalliance all about and who implemented the version (dated from 2004) that's on their sourceforge page. Why is guice using this version instead of a more known package such as AspectJ?

Also, do you know of any tutorials on the aopalliance version?

Thanks

Kassey

Answer 1

AOP Alliance is a set of interfaces that multiple frameworks implement (see AOP Alliance Motivations), including both Guice and Spring.

AOP Alliance was chosen for Guice because it has a high capability and a simple API.

The Guice wiki has an AOP guide.

Confront

But isn't guice using the aopallience.jar from the sourceforge site? Who implemented this aopallience.jar? thanks – Kassey

Pretty sure aopalliance was primarily the work of Rod Johnson in the early days of Springs AOP support. It was an excellent initiative to facilitate interop/portability of aspects across AOP frameworks. – Mousse

IMHO AOP Alliance is a dead horse still being ridden. It would be better if there were more sophisticated AOP frameworks like AspectJ instead of minimal (and minimally useful) pseudo standards like AOP Alliance. But that is just my two cents. The question was answered correctly, I just wanted to counter-balance the hooray here. – Conviction

From Renaud Pawlak's page at cincheo.com/renaud-pawlak: 2003 -- AOPAlliance -- Generic API for Aspect Oriented Programming, co-created with Rod Johnson (creator of the Spring project). -- Not active but still widely used – Escrow