I agree that we should design a new API. IMHO the design of this API poses quite a challenge to the JBoss AOP team. Being dynamic is one of the strongest points of JBoss AOP and yet we need to provide something easy and intuititve to use, without taking out the power of flexibility (or, at least, try to balance simplicity with flexibililty).

I think we should be able of providing most of the options a user has when defining an xml. And I also think it would be a great step to provide overloaded methods as a way of avoiding null parameters. I mean, if you need to use cflow, choose the method with cflow parameter. If you don't need, passing a null cflow is not accepted, use the method without cflow instead (in the current API, you must use null in AdviceBinding constructor to indicate that a binding won't use cflow).

What do you say about annotation overrides? Maybe it would be an interesting feature to add it to our dynamic API? Or you think it would just make things too complicated?

Yes, the DBO is a nice idea. The handle is not only needed for removal, but also for binding updates.

I think we should also provide some sort of dynamic AOP transaction, useful for two reasons:

DynamicAOP.start();
DynamicAOP.add(dbo1, dbo2, dbo3);
DynamicAOP.remove(oldDbo1.getHandle(), oldDbo2.getHandle(), oldDbo3.getHandle());
DynamicAOP.commit();

DynamicAOP.add(dbo1, dbo2, dbo3);
DynamicAOP.remove(oldDbo1.getHandle(), oldDbo2.getHandle(), oldDbo3.getHandle());

I've been thinking about this API, and I realized that, if I was going to use it, I would rather do this:

String pointcut = "execution(*->new(..))";
Object handle = DynamicAOP.bind(pointcut, MyAspect.class, "adviceName");

String pointcut = "execution(*->new(..))";
DynamicBindingOperation dbo = new DynamicBindingOperation();
dbo.setPointcut(pontcut);
AdviceInfo advice = new AdviceInfo(MyAspect.class, "adviceName");
dbo.setAdviceInfo(advice);
DynamicAOP.execute(dbo);