Seam Interceptors vs. AspectJ

[jskillings07]

I would like to integrate a license management feature within my
Seam application, using the steps outlined at the following URL.

http://manoharviswanathan.com/blog/tech/licence-management-for-java-web-applications-using-aspects/

Intially, I thought this would be a very straight forward implementation, but the more I look into, the issue seems to be Seam's minimal support for AOP and AspectJ.

Can any one let me know if Seam Interceptors are the only way to go to achieve the necessary functionality here or is there better alternative?

Thank you.

John

[jacob.orshalick]

I have used AspectJ with Spring applications but never with a Seam application as I have always been able to achieve what I needed through interceptors.  You could always give AspectJ a shot with the ajc compiler and report back your results ;)

Perhaps I do not fully understand your requirements, but interceptors seem like a reasonable approach for your scenario.  Why not simply define an annotation to tag the concerned classes and define a stereotype for the classes?  Say,

@Name("myLicensedClass")
@LicenseRestricted
public class MyLicensedClass {
  ... ...

It's then quite simple to define an interceptor:

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Interceptors(LicensingInterceptor.class)
@Inherited
public @interface LicenseRestricted {}

Hope that helps.

[pmuir]

I don't see how Seam limits you in using AOP?

[jskillings07]

Agreed.  Seam provides AOP support using Interceptors.   My questions was more on integrating AspectJ, and I have not seen any concrete examples of AspectJ integration. Hence my inquiry in the first place.

[pmuir]

Your Seam components and JPA entities are POJOs so you should be able to use any AOP library to do bytecode enhancement. For example, with JBoss AS, look at JBoss AOP as it is built in.

No, there is no special integration, there doesn't need to be.