[Springframework-developer] AOP changes

[Rod J. <rod...@in...>]

All,

I've just committed some changes to the Advisor hierarchy, to get rid of the
parallel hierarchy between Advisors and Advices, which was bothering me.

Now instead of having a hierarchy of Advisors, Advisor has a getAdvice()
method that returns Object. It can't be more strongly typed because of AOP
Alliance compliance. Originally I think I wanted to get away from such weak
typing, but I'm just not happy with the old parallel class hierarchices.
There are no longer specific Advisor subclasses, like
DefaultMethodBeforeAdvisor: their's just DefaultPointcutAdvisor. An Advisor
has a pointcut associated with it or not.

There are quite a few fewer classes in the new approach (-17 I think). And
it's more flexible, as DefaultPointcutAdvisor can be reused for any advice
type.

The impact on user code should be quite small. If you've extended one of
those advisors, extend the appropriate generic PointcutAdvisor subclass.
RegExpMethodPointcutAdvisor now replaces the old Around advice pointcut
advisor.

The changes make it possible to reuse the regexp pointcut advisor (or other
pointcut advisor subclasses) for any kind of advice.

Because this is a public API change, I think we need to consider going RC2,
instead of straight to 1.0 now. I was strongly in favour of going straight
to 1.0, but there have also been some other public API changes (notably in
JDBC) as well as the new Quartz functionality, so I vote for a quick release
of RC2 (early this week) and a goal of 1.0 2 weeks after that, with NO more
changes except bug fixes.

Regards,
Rod