Adrian, I think I have fixed the issue :-).

The good news is that now JBoss AS is faster.
I have measured start up time 5 times with and without the fix:

[list=]
Without the fix: 57s:000ms, 56s:523ms, 58s:512ms, 59s:179ms, and 1m:1s:315ms

With the fix: 43s:773ms, 43s:418ms, 42s:935ms, 45s:59ms, and 43s:761ms


So, apparently, the server is 25% faster!

Adrian, in case you are wondering what would be cause of the bug...

The method Advisor.hasAnnotation(), that has the annotation name and the annotation class, was calling Advisor.hasJoinpointAnnotationFromStringName() method. This method receives only the annotation name and tries to load its class... so, a simple refactoring avoided this unnecessary class loading step, which was the one that was generating the error.

Tough question :)

Unfortunately, 2.0.0CR2 is already tagged... I should have released it last week, but I need the Messaging team ok for that (http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAOP-253).

I only found out that after tagging the release (and, based on what I thought had been done for CR1, I thought I should reschedule the task for 2.0.0GA.).

Regarding the GA schedule in Jira, it is definitely wrong... probably Kabir meant 2007 instead of 2009. AFAIK, the current schedule is to release it in the next month. Maybe it won't be released soon enough, though. I think we should go for a CR3 on the beginning of the month to release this bug fix.

Yes, I have already packaged the release... the only thing that is not done is:
-publish it at jboss.org (need svn access for that)
-add it to buildthirdparty (because of the messaging issue I didn't know how to resolve)
-and, finally, add it to the maven repo...

If we can do a retagging, I think we should go for that. I am not sure, however, whether we should wait for the fix of JBAOP-499.
But maybe we should include, also, the fixes JBAOP-500 (I'm about to commit it) and JBAOP-256 (I have already done it, but need to test before commiting.

We are currently facing a problem with PojoCache and AOP, when starting up the server on all mode.
Without this being fixed, we cannot do another release. :(
I'm working on it now.

JBoss AOP 2.0.0.CR3 has been released today.

Thanks to Jason Greene's help, I have found out that the problem was being caused by an incompatibility with JBoss AOP 2.0.0.Beta1, which requires recompilation of Pojo Cache. Before this recompilation, the JBoss AOP version cannot be upgraded in the AS.

Kabir and Jason are coordinatinating our AOP release with a new release of PojoCache for that matter.