AspectJ, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Spring AOP

Aspect, AOP, AspectJ, Spring AOP, AspectJ vs Spring AOP

What's an Aspect? What's Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)?

An Aspect can be understood as a crosscutting concern which can not be covered by the usual grouping and abstraction mechanisms supported by the various programming methodologies. Why is that so? Because many concerns can cut across multiple abstractions as defined by the underlying program and hence the name 'crosscutting concern'. Right? To understand it better we can think of a simple example: In any typical Web Application (dealing with DB source) there are numerous occasions where we need to write code for opening a connection (or fetching a connection from a pool if we use Connection Pooling), defining a transaction to fire all the DML statements (contained in the transaction) in entirety and commit the changes or to simply rollback any changes made to the source in case even a single statement of the transaction fails. Now this transaction processing stuff can be thought of as an aspect and any developer using a typical programming language needs to code all the underlying stuff manually. Now, using AOP, this widely used crosscutting concern (as a typical programming abstraction can not be used for doing this directly) can be handled declaratively. This is just a sample example and the idea is to make you feel how easy (and hence fast-paced and robust) application programming can be by using this approach.

Logging is another stereo-type example of crosscutting concern widely used in almost every application. Why the developer should be bothered about coding/maintaining this using all the Logging classes/interfaces when s/he can do away with this by using an AOP in a declarative manner. As is the case with any other declarative code, this will also be translated back to the actual programming code and compiled thereafter, but who cares if all this is done behind the scenes. And not to forget that Translators/Compilers don't make mistakes while humans may (or should I say 'will' :-)) and hence using a declarative approach not only make the life simpler, but also improves the robustness of the entire application. Security is another very popular example of crosscutting concern which can effectively be handled using an AOP implementation.

Another great benefit of using AOP for such crosscutting concern implementation in an application is apparently visible if we need to change the underlying approach/considerations (say for example security considerations) then it might require a hell lot of effort to identify all the scattered code fragments doing the task and changing them to perform the new considerations/standards won't be easier either. Using AOP to handle such stuff will only require some declarative changes say for example it can be as simple as adding an advice and appropriate pointchecks.This will automatically check all such instances when any of the pointchecks match and in that case the advice will guarantee the execution of either the added security considerations or the changes ones. Wow, so easy? Yes, it is.

AspectJ - what's this?

It's an aspect-oriented extension to the Java programming language. The syntax is quite similar to that of Java and all the valid Java programs are valid AspectJ programs. But not the vice-versa as AspectJ supports many programming constructs alien to Java which are used to define and use aspects in applications. Eclipse Foundation first released this extension in 2001 and now it is available both as a stand-alone extension (pluggable to many popular frameworks) and integrated into Eclipse. AspectJ was originally developed by Gregor Kiczales and his team at Xerox PARC. See below what Eclipse Foundation says about AspectJ:


AspectJ is possibly the most generic and widely-used AOP extension and it focuses primarily on simplicity and usability. A Java-like syntax makes and availability of plug-ins for many popular frameworks make it even more popular with Java developers worldwide.

Some of the aspects which probably can not be defined by a typical programming language directly (not at least declaratively) and which can be easily achieved by using AspectJ are:

• Ability to add members (methods of fields) within existing classes
• Ability to define pointcuts when some method is called, some object is instantiated, etc.
• Ability to run a piece of code before/after a pointcut is matched

Spring AOP. How is Spring AOP different from AspectJ?

Spring AOP is just another AOP implementation which comes with the Spring Framework bundle developed by SpringSource and released under Apache Licence 2.0.

Spring AOP differs from AspectJ probably in complexity and consequently in capabilities. Spring AOP implementation is less complex than the AspectJ implementation and hence less capable as compared to AspectJ. The main reason to keep Spring AOP simpler is because one of the foundation principles on which the Spring Framework was designed and developed is 'Simplicity'. In addition, Spring belives that most of the users don't really need those really complex features of AspectJ in their applications and hence Spring AOP would probably be more than sufficient for most of the application developers. In case there are a select few who want to use those missing features then they are most welcome to use AspectJ from within Spring Framework has support fro AspectJ since Spring 1.2 version itself and in every subsequent release they have continued making the integration even better. This will facilitate the developers to have the best of both the worlds. BTW, Spring AOP implementation is far more capable than it may sound here (only because it's being compared with the best of breed and de-facto AOP implementation named AspectJ) and the Spring Framework uses Spring AOP for transaction management, security handling, remote access, and JMX.

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