AspectJ 5 Released This Week

AspectJ 5 was released this week on December 20, 2005.

The best details of what this includes is in the The AspectJ 5 Development Kit Developer's Notebook.

Here is a brief summary of the enhancements made; most of which are to take advantage of features introduced by JDK 1.5:

• annotations


• generics


• autoboxing


• varargs


• enumerated types


• covariance - lets you override a method and narrow its return type (something straight Java does not let you do)

Aspects look like they provide a way to handle a lot of difficult software engineering/maintenance problems elegantly.