AspectJ Development Environment (AJDE) support for NetBeans

AspectJ Development Environment support for NetBeans

This documents the AspectJ Development Environment (AJDE) module extension to the NetBeans and Forte for Java /SunOne integrated development environments (IDE's) to support aspect-oriented programming using AspectJ.

A great article on Aspect-Oriented Programming with Sun(tm)ONE Studio by Vaughn Spurlin is also available.

Overview

AJDE for NetBeans enables you to:

compile AspectJ and Java files within the IDE
browse the structure of your AspectJ program
set up a compile configuration that determine which files will be passed to the compiler

Installation

Unzip the distribution zip file into a temporary directory, and copy the jars from the modules and lib directories into your NetBeans installation (i.e., the module jar into the modules directory and the AspectJ jars into the lib/ext directory).
The distribution will also contain the two html files "LICENCE-AspectJForNetBeans.html" and "README-AspectJForNetBeans.html", along with this file in the docs directory.
Start up NetBeans, and in the "Tools" menu select "Global Options"
If necessary, right-click the "Modules" item and select "New Module from File...". Find the module jar file in the directory that you installed into (e.g. c:/NetBeans4j/modules) and select it.

To uninstall follow NetBeans's documentation on un-installing modules, or simply remove the file modules/aspectjForNetbeans.jar from NetBeans's install directory.

Running AJDE for NetBeans

3.1 Setting up the AspectJ Examples AJDE in NetBeans 3.3.2

You will need to download the AspectJ distribution (which contains the examples in the docs directory) from http://eclipse.org/aspectj (or use your current version of the examples).
In the "Project" menu select "Project Manager"
Click "New..." and enter "AspectJ Examples" as the projects' name and click "OK".
In the "Filesystems" Explorer tab right click "Filesystems", then select "Mount -> Local Directory".
Browse into the AspectJ install directory (e.g. "C:/apps/aspectj1.0")
Select "examples" and click "Finish"
In the "Tools" menu select "AspectJ -> Start AJDE" or just click on the "AJDE" () button (shown as label 1 of the screenshot).

3.2 Compiling the Spacewar Example

After AJDE is started, a new "AspectJ" tab is added to the explorer window. Click it. The next thing to do is to choose a particular build, since there are many in the examples distribution. To the right of the "Build" button () there is a downward arrow. Click it, and select "spacewar/demo.lst" (as in label 2 of the screenshot). This will start a build of the demo configuration of spacewar. Clicking the "Build" button will rebuild.
When the compile is finished and the "AspectJ Explorer" structure is present navigate the structure by clicking nodes (as shown in label 3 of the screenshot). Note that associations between nodes appear with UML-style arrow icons and italicized names and reperesent how a particular node in the structure relates to others. In order to navigate these associations expand the notes and click the corresponding links (in blue). These links represent structure nodes elsewhere in the tree.
If there are compilation errors, clickable messages will appear (as in label 4 of the screenshot).

3.3 Running the Spacewar Example

You may now need to add the AspectJ Runtime to the project so that the debugger can see it. In the same way as described in 3.1 select "Mount -> Archive (JAR, Zip)".
Browse to the your lib/ext/aspectjrt.jar file within your NetBeans install directory and click "Finish".
In the "Filesystems" Explorer tab open the "spacewar" directory, right click "spacewar/Game.java", and the select "Execute".
When finished executing switch back to the "Editing" mode.
Select and build the "debug.lst" configuration as described in 3.2 and execute again--you will notice that the debug configuration adds a debug window used for tracing by including the "Debug.java" aspect in the compile.

3.4 Debugging the Spacewar Example

You must first add the filesystem to the project so that the debugger can see the main class. Do this in the "Project AspectJ Examples" tab in the explorer by right clicking the root node and selecting "Add Existing...".
Select "Project -> Set Project Main Class..." in the menu bar, browse to "spacewar/Game.java" in the examples directory that you created and click "OK".
In the "Filesystems" Explorer tab open the "spacewar" directory, click "Game.java", and the select "Debug -> Strat" from the menu bar.

AspectJ-related options can be modified in the AJDE settings window.