The aim of this document is to present the AOP Alliance project. Its goals, its philosophy, what answers it should provide, and what it should not. It is a draft proposal which has to be further discussed with other members of the AOP Alliance in order to reach a common view on what we are doing here. It should also be completed as soon as an interesting point comes out from the discussions on the list.
This document is a white paper and can be used on internal purpose by the AOP Alliance members, but also to provide an insight and an understanding about what is AOP Alliance for external people.
In section 1, I will try to explain in general terms the goals of the AOP Alliance. Our motivations comes from the fact that AOP can improve solutions such as J2EE-based ones. If we manage to define a normalize set of APIs, it would be possible to integrate AOP in existing solutions or to build AOP environments using existing AOP tools. Section 2 gives an overview of a proposed architecture and APIs for aspect-oriented environments. I try to guess what APIs should be specified by the AOP Alliance. Finally, in section 3, I enter into the details of the identified components and their roles within AOP environments.