Aspects, Annotations, and Interceptors, Oh My!

I'm so very excited to get working on my research project this summer. The release of Java 1.5 has introduced nice features into the language, notably annotations. Annotations are little statements before a class or method that start with '@' and give some meta-information about that code. I can then look it up later to make my code be more customizable. This leads a lot into aspect-oriented programming, which I've been skeptical of, until I realized my project is best as an aspect-oriented project. If my cache is properly implemented, someone should just be able to add an annotation with some information about the parameters and then it should just work. I guess a second annotation would be needed to show that my interceptor is called.

Java has upgraded their web service implementation for this, as well. This catches it up with ASP.NET web services, possibly exceeding it in ease of development. It's still probably harder to run since the web service needs to run in several different application servers, not just IIS.