just wrote the first batch of code for lego4j

Would you like to be able to write code like this ?

public class Foo {
  @RetryOnException( E.class, 1 )
  public String bar( int arg1 ) throws E {
    return doSomeThingThatMightThrowE( arg1 );
  }
}

instead of having to write something like this:

public class Foo {
  public String bar( int arg1 ) throws E {
    int retries = 0;
    while (true) {
      try {
        return doSomeThingThatMightThrowE( arg1 );
      }
      catch (E e) {
        if (retries < 5) {
          continue;
        }
        throw e;
      }
    }    
  }
}

This is what lego4j is about, creating a library of lightweight aspects to encapsulate local concerns programmers encounter while writing a generic Java application.

timed invocation aspect

In the interview Joshua Bloch on Closures, Resource Management, Google, Joshua Bloch mentions, and praises, a facility a google employee created to timeout method invocations. A couple of years ago I had the need for such utility and ended up creating it. That code is nowhere to be seen now, as my employer has changed a couple of times since then.

Most certainly this is a very handy facility in everyday programming. It will be very nice if the "method timeout invocation" concern could be easly integrated into the code using aspects!

@timeout(millis=1000)
public void foo() {
...
}

Where:

/**
 * Times out a method invocation. If any of the methods matched by the pointcut invocationToTimeOut() has not  
 * returned after the specified timeout, the unchecked exception InvocationTimeout will be thrown.
 */
aspect TimeoutInvocation {
...
}