AspectJ Integration

AOP provides a powerful solution to many of the common problems that arise with OOP applications. When using Spring AOP, you can take advantage of a select subset of AOP functionality that, in most cases, allows you to solve problems you encounter in your application. However, in some cases, you may wish to use some AOP features that are outside the scope of Spring AOP. In this case, you need to look at an AOP implementation with a fuller feature set. Our preference, in this case, is to use AspectJ, and because you can now configure AspectJ aspects using Spring, AspectJ forms the perfect complement to Spring AOP.

AspectJ is a fully featured AOP implementation that uses compile-time weaving to introduce aspects into your code. In AspectJ, aspects and pointcuts are built using a Java-like syntax, which reduces the learning curve for Java developers. We are not going to spend too much time looking at AspectJ and how it works, because that is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we present some simple AspectJ examples and show you how to configure them using Spring. For more information on AspectJ, you should definitely read AspectJ in Action by Raminvas Laddad (Manning, 2003).