Plugin reuse and adaptation with Object Teams: Don't settle for a compromise!

Stephan Herrmann

Eclipse IDE And Languages - Java · Long - one hour
Wednesday, 16:30, 50 minutes | Room 207

Stephan Herrmann

When reusing existing plugins for something innovative, you're likely to do things the original plugin author has not anticipated. This typically brings about some kinds of compromise:

You adjust your requirements to what the reused plugins provide.
Thus you settle for a different product than you intended.
Or, you refrain from reuse but develop everything from scratch,
settling for much lower productivity.
Or, you apply some brute force method (like copy&paste) to get your job done,
but then you settle for a brittle design, that is a pain to maintain.

With Object Teams it is possible to eat the cake (apply unanticipated adaptations by disciplined aspect bindings) and still have it (sustain a well modularized, maintainable design). OT/Equinox brings this power to the development of Eclipse plugins (Equinox bundles).

This demo will show several real world examples from the implementation of the OTDT itself. Included are adaptations of a variety of plugins like JDT, Debug, PDE, JUnit, Workbench etc.

Stephan Herrmann received his Ph.D. at Technische Universität Berlin in 2002 for his work on applying new techniques for separation of concerns to the development of a multi-view software engineering environment.
Since then his focus is on developing the language ObjectTeams/Java (OT/J) and its tools. He was the leader of the publically funded TOPPrax project (5 institutions) which developed the tooling for OT/J and conducted real-world case studies with OT/J. He has been teaching OT/J in class since 2003 and in tutorials at international conferences (NODe'05 and AOSD'06).
Stephan has organized the 2007-edition of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) and several workshops. He has been a speaker at international conferences like OOPSLA, TOOLS, AOSD and: EclipseCon.