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Aspect Oriented Programming with Spring

Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP) complements Object-oriented Programming (OOP) by providing another way of thinking about program structure. The key unit of modularity in OOP is the class, whereas in AOP the unit of modularity is the aspect. Aspects enable the modularization of concerns (such as transaction management) that cut across multiple types and objects. (Such concerns are often termed "crosscutting" concerns in AOP literature.)

One of the key components of Spring is the AOP framework. While the Spring IoC container does not depend on AOP (meaning you do not need to use AOP if you don’t want to), AOP complements Spring IoC to provide a very capable middleware solution.

Spring AOP with AspectJ pointcuts

Spring provides simple and powerful ways of writing custom aspects by using either a schema-based approach or the @AspectJ annotation style. Both of these styles offer fully typed advice and use of the AspectJ pointcut language while still using Spring AOP for weaving.

This chapter discusses the schema- and @AspectJ-based AOP support. The lower-level AOP support is discussed in the following chapter.

AOP is used in the Spring Framework to:

  • Provide declarative enterprise services. The most important such service is declarative transaction management.

  • Let users implement custom aspects, complementing their use of OOP with AOP.

If you are interested only in generic declarative services or other pre-packaged declarative middleware services such as pooling, you do not need to work directly with Spring AOP, and can skip most of this chapter.