Popped along to Smiths of Smithfield to meetup with a
few java coders this evening, one of those fancy bars where a small
coke will set you back £1.50 (almost as expensive as printer ink).
To me the most interesting topic revolved around the use of AOP,
specifically with AspectJ.
The good point was made that although
AspectJ has a good toolset support (Eclipse et all), the one thing in
a real deployment environment that will always get in the way
is maintainability. What is the point of having an amazing orthogonal
experience with Aspects, when the next developer to look at your
code comes along and scratches his head.
One of the main reasons
we develop in Java is the 'portability of developers' across projects,
so that a developer could get up and running in a short amount of
time with anything assigned from above. I guess this places AspectJ
onto the JavaCC/xDoclet/etc pile of amazingly useful, succinct technology
but with 'immediate barrier to understanding' for the developer who
has not jumped onto that particular lilypad of the Java quagmire. Now
if only I could think of a useful reason to use AOP...
Let me know what
wonderful/useful orthogonal aspect I can add to my code today
in the comments...
Also... on the plus side for speedy xml transformations was the
XSLT in firmware beauty of rack mounted box from datapower.com, although I think cost is the issue here (for me anyways).
For my loft/'broadband connection' a funky little motherboard with
low noise for £70 didn't sound to bad from www.mini-itx.com, maybe this
is the answer for my public cvs/blog/jira server (low noise a priority)
Java Meetup was a good laugh, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get a different perspective on their java day.
Thanks to Simon for organising it.
21 Jul 2003
