Useful Aspects

28 Feb 2006

We’ve recently gone through a migration from 1.4.2 to 5.0.

I haven’t really had the opportunity to experiment with aspects much beyond the transaction management aspects provided by the Spring framework.

That being said, there were a couple interesting aspects on clientjava today:

1. SyncModel Aspect
2. JavaBean Aspect

The SyncModel aspect is basically a method-level annotation that will spin method invocation off of the EDT thread (similar to SwingWorker/Spin/Foxtrot, etc). I haven’t used it but it looks interesting.

With all of that said, I don’t know that AOP can really solve all of your swing threading issues. While the aspect does work rather well, this is not a good solution for tasks that need to be able to be canceled or used in a progress bar. But for short little tasks that can cause brief lockups in the GUI, this could be a reasonable solution.

I would agree. If nothing else, it’s a good talking point.

The JavaBean aspect also looks interesting and is a mechanism for annotating a data model class so that it can be used in combination with the JGoodies binding framework. I haven’t worked much with the JGoodies binding framework so I can’t really comment any more than that. It definitely looks interesting and when I have some cycles I’ll start playing with it. A couple years back I did hack out a basic binding framework and its interesting to see the similarities to Karsten’s work.