When working in Eclipse, it is common practice to add the output folder of one project to be on the aspect path of another project. This, however, is not the proper way of adding dependencies between projects.
In the past, this was done because there was no other option to put aspects on aspect paths. This causes a problem in that it may cause spurious second builds of projects after a full build. Since AJDT 1.5.3 and the latest dev version of AJDT 1.6, the proper way of adding dependencies between projects is to add the project itself to the aspect path. This will cut the time for a full build by almost one half if there are many aspect paths being used. For those of you interested in the details as to why there are spurious builds, continue reading. Everyone else may simply move on to the next message in your inbox... After a full build in Eclipse, all output folders have been wiped and recreated. If there is a project that depends on a binary folder that is the output folder of another project, the timestamp on the contents of the binary folder will be newer than the timestamp on the source folder of the dependent project. This will cause a second build *after* the full build completes. An illustration may make this more clear: Consider a dependent AJ project A that has the binary folder B/bin (of an AJ project B) on its aspect path. Here is what happens on a full build: 1. A & B's output folders are wiped clean 2. Projects A & B are built in an unspecified order (actually, the order seems to be alphabetical) 3. Since Project B's bin folder may be empty when project A is built project B's aspects may not be woven into Project A (this will occur if project A is built first). 4. Regardless of the build order, after the build completes, the timestamp on Project B's output folder is new than the timestamp on Project A's source folder. 5. This causes a second build, incremental in Project A so that its source files are properly woven with B's binary files. The result is a correctly woven project A, but it takes an extra build to get there. Again, the solution is to use project dependencies instead of binary dependencies. I will soon be adding a check to the build path that flags the user when there is this kind of binary dependency. --a _______________________________________________ aspectj-users mailing list aspectj-users@eclipse.org https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/aspectj-users
