Palo Alto Research Center and Eclipse Announce Release of AspectJ to the Open Source Community

Palo Alto, CA, March 18, 2003 — The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Eclipse announced the transfer of AspectJ™ technology from PARC to Eclipse and through the Eclipse Technology Project, to the entire open-source community. AspectJ has an active following in both the research and industrial communities, and represents a well-researched toolkit for Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).
Jim Hugunin, a PARC researcher who led the original development work on AspectJ said, “We are pleased that the Eclipse community will continue to enhance and refine the AspectJ code. Together, we are working hard to get the next release out and welcome broad community support.”

“Eclipse and the Eclipse Technology Project are delighted to become the new home of AspectJ,” said Dr. Brian Barry, who leads the Eclipse Technology Project. “AspectJ represents an outstanding example of new approaches to improving the developer experience and software productivity that have been enabled by reusing core elements of the Eclipse Platform.”

The most recent release of AspectJ builds on the Eclipse Java™ Development Tools (JDT) framework that is proving to establish a successful synergy between the Eclipse and AspectJ movements.

AspectJ provides a Java language extension and toolset that allows developers to better deal with problems that occur in large software systems by separating out and centralizing solutions for crosscutting issues. Some aspects of system implementation, such as logging, error handling, standards enforcement and feature variations are notoriously difficult to implement in a modular way. The result is that code is tangled across a system and leads to quality, productivity and maintenance problems. Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) enables the clean modularization of these crosscutting concerns. The AspectJ Development Tools project provides Eclipse platform based support for AOSD that seeks to deliver a user experience that is consistent with existing Java Development Tools (JDT).

Distributions of open-source projects managed by Eclipse are available under the Common Public License. This license permits commercial works to be made of the distributions royalty free. The Open Software Initiative (www.opensource.org/licenses/) has certified the CPL.

The US Department of Commerce Advanced Technology Project funded the original work on Aspect Oriented Programming. In addition, DARPA – The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency –funded the early development work of AspectJ at PARC and the community building costs associated with it. PARC wishes to thank both agencies for their support.

For more information about AspectJ on Eclipse, please go to: www.eclipse.org/aspectj/index.html.

About PARC:

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in physical, computational, and social sciences. Building on our three-decade tradition of innovation, PARC works with Xerox and other strategic partners to commercialize technologies created by our renowned scientists. Incorporated in early 2002, PARC is defining a new vision for how pioneering research creates commercial opportunities. For more information about the Palo Alto Research Center, please visit www.parc.com.

About Eclipse

Eclipse is an open-source community that creates technology and a universal platform for tools integration. The open-source Eclipse community creates royalty-free technology as a platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and use software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, tool producers can concentrate on their areas of expertise and the creation of new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java™ language, and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux®, Posix, QNX® and Windows® based systems. Full details of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at www.eclipse.org.