The Object Teams Blog

This post was originally written on August 6th, 2013, but got lost when moving this blog. Luckily I could recover it from backup.

Software composition by “weaving”

Programming languages in the wider field of Aspect Oriented Software Development introduce some kinds of composition concepts, that cannot directly be mapped to pure Java. We got used to speaking of “weaving” as a mechanism for preparing classes in these languages for execution on the JVM, whereas a true aspect oriented virtual machine would natively perform this composition transparently and more efficiently. But with the dominance of the JVM it will be “weaving” for a long time to come.

Back in the early days, AOSD languages performed some static composition on source or class files. When OT/J entered the stage, first frameworks emerged that allowed us to hook into the class loading process, so we could do the weaving dynamically on-the-fly, without ever storing the woven classes on disk. Work is (still) in the pipe-line to support even runtime-(re)weaving.

One theme in all the development of Object Teams is: first solve the dynamic case, that’s where the challenges lie, and leave more static cases for later as an optimization. “Later” has come now.

How (not) to hook into class loading?

A little while into the development of OT/J, Java 5 was published introducing the JPLIS API and the concept of a -javaagent. Today many instrumentation tools use this facility and OT/J was among the first on this boat. So for standalone Java applications the problem is solved.

Later, while developing Eclipse plug-ins, we noticed that it wouldn’t be overly cool if you have to invoke Eclipse with a -javaagent. Not only is this very inconvenient for installation, it is also problematic (e.g., for performance) to feed all classes of Eclipse through our weaver. We were lucky again, and the Equinox Adaptor Hooks emerged right when we needed them. With these hooks we were able to integrate OT/J in a way that enables all the on-the-fly flexibility we want while at the same time it lets us control the process so that the flexibility cannot be abused. So in Equinox (or better: OT/Equinox) the problem is (more than) solved.

The fact that Eclipse Luna will no longer support these hooks was slightly alarming news for Object Teams, but that problem is already essentially solved – details to be reported soon.

I’ve heard about successful experiments running OT/J code in tomcat, but, hey, the list of application servers/containers is long, and if we need specifically crafted integration for each environment, it’s kind of difficult to argue that OT/J runs “everywhere”. Is there a generic why to kick the fly-shuttle?

Dynamic weaving is cool, but not having a fallback is uncool, so I finally developed the static scenario as a special case of the dynamic one: a build-time weaver for OT/J.

The little new tool is ridiculously simple: we have a weaver capable of load-time weaving. All I had to do is: create a little utility that would invoke this weaver ahead-of-time, i.e., during building.

While I’m not a big fan of Maven, in my day job Maven is a must, so I bit the bullet used the opportunity to learn a bit about development of Maven plug-ins. I was amazed to find lots of tutorials still suggesting to use API that are deprecated in Maven 3 and more surprised to read forum threads suggesting to still use that deprecated API, partly to be compatible with Maven 2 (OK?) and partly because deprecation doesn’t always mean there is an alternative (OOPS?). It’s also interesting to see, that much fundamental, up-to-date information is not available from a central source but only from tribal knowledge in hundreds of forums, blogs and whatnots. — Enough whining, on to the new stuff.

For simple projects, all you need now is a pom that looks about like this:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
 
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
 
    <parent>
        <groupId>org.eclipse.objectteams</groupId>
        <artifactId>objectteams-parent-pom</artifactId>
        <version>2.2.0</version>
    </parent>
 
    <artifactId>OTStopwatch_Built-Time_Weaver_Example</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
 
    <properties>
        <tycho.version>0.18.0</tycho.version>
        <otj.version>2.2.0</otj.version>
    </properties>
 
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.eclipse.objectteams</groupId>
                <artifactId>objectteams-weaver-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>0.8.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>weave</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
                <configuration>
                    <teamClasses>
                        <teamClass>org.eclipse.objectteams.example.stopwatch.WatchUI</teamClass>
                        <teamClass>org.eclipse.objectteams.example.stopwatch.WatchUIAnalog</teamClass>
                    </teamClasses>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
 
    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>ObjectTeamsRepository</id>
            <name>Object Teams Repository</name>
            <url>http://download.eclipse.org/objectteams/maven/3/repository</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>
 
   <dependencies>
       <dependency>
           <groupId>org.eclipse.objectteams</groupId>
           <artifactId>objectteams-runtime</artifactId>
           <version>${otj.version}</version>
       </dependency>
   </dependencies>
</project>
 

Here we enable OT/J compilation via the parent pom, specify a repo where to get the OT artifacts, a dependency and a few versions, nothing sophisticated.

What’s new is the objectteams-weaver-maven-plugin, which is minimally configured just by specifying a list of team classes that should be woven. Oops, that’s already it.

By integrating this into your build, you’ll produce class files that can be directly executed “everywhere”, i.e., without the OT/J load-time weaver, and thus: without fiddling with the class loading process. One caveat remains: naturally, by producing the woven class files offline, it will be your responsibility to correctly feed the correct versions of class files into the classpath in the desired order. If you can’t use the load-time weaver, it won’t be able to help keep things simple.

More configuration options are documented on the plug-in’s site and more explanation using our favorite examples can be found in the wiki.

Here you have it: static weaving falls of naturally if you already have dynamic weaving. And the resulting class files can truly be run “everywhere”.

I’d be curious to hear of the first OT/J apps on Android (though personally I’d prefer ubuntu).