Introduction to Spring AOP

Last updated: May 11, 2024

Written by: baeldung

Spring+

reference
Spring AOP

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

1. Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll introduce AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) with Spring, and learn how we can use this powerful tool in practical scenarios.

It’s also possible to leverage AspectJ’s annotations when developing with Spring AOP, but in this article, we’ll focus on the core Spring AOP XML-based configuration.

Introduction to Pointcut Expressions in Spring

A quick and practical intro to Spring AOP and Pointcut Expressions.

Implementing a Custom Spring AOP Annotation

A quick example of a custom Spring AOP annotation

Introduction to Advice Types in Spring

A quick intro to AOP in Spring and working with Advice types to cross-cut across your application concerns.

2. Overview

AOP is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does this by adding additional behavior to existing code without modifying the code itself.

Instead, we can declare the new code and the new behaviors separately.

Spring’s AOP framework helps us implement these cross-cutting concerns.

3. Maven Dependencies

Let’s start by adding Spring’s AOP library dependency in the pom.xml:

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
</parent>
 
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-aop</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

The latest version of the dependency can be checked here.

4. AOP Concepts and Terminology

Let’s briefly go over the concepts and terminology specific to AOP:

4.1. Business Object

A business object is a normal class that has a normal business logic. Let’s look at a simple example of a business object where we just add two numbers:

public class SampleAdder {
    public int add(int a, int b) {
        return a + b;
    }
}

Note that this class is a normal class with business logic, without any Spring-related annotations.

4.2. Aspect

An aspect is a modularization of a concern that cuts across multiple classes. Unified logging can be an example of such cross-cutting concern.

Let’s see how we define a simple Aspect:

public class AdderAfterReturnAspect {
    private Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass());
    public void afterReturn(Object returnValue) throws Throwable {
        logger.info("value return was {}",  returnValue);
    }
}

In the above example, we defined a simple Java class that has a method called afterReturn, which takes one argument of type Object and logs in that value. Note that even our AdderAfterReturnAspect is a standard class, free of any Spring annotations.

In the next sections, we’ll see how we can wire this Aspect to our Business Object.

4.3. Joinpoint

A Joinpoint is a point during the execution of a program, such as the execution of a method or the handling of an exception.

In Spring AOP, a JoinPoint always represents a method execution.

4.4. Pointcut

A Pointcut is a predicate that helps match an Advice to be applied by an Aspect at a particular JoinPoint.

We often associate the Advice with a Pointcut expression, and it runs at any Joinpoint matched by the Pointcut.

4.5. Advice

An Advice is an action taken by an aspect at a particular Joinpoint. Different types of advice include “around,” “before,” and “after.”

In Spring, an Advice is modelled as an interceptor, maintaining a chain of interceptors around the Joinpoint.

4.6. Wiring Business Object and Aspect

Now let’s look at how we can wire a Business Object to an Aspect with an After-Returning advice.

Below is the config excerpt that we’d place in a standard Spring config in the “<beans>” tag:

<bean id="sampleAdder" class="org.baeldung.logger.SampleAdder" />
<bean id="doAfterReturningAspect" 
  class="org.baeldung.logger.AdderAfterReturnAspect" />
<aop:config>
    <aop:aspect id="aspects" ref="doAfterReturningAspect">
       <aop:pointcut id="pointCutAfterReturning" expression=
         "execution(* org.baeldung.logger.SampleAdder+.*(..))"/>
       <aop:after-returning method="afterReturn"
         returning="returnValue" pointcut-ref="pointCutAfterReturning"/>
    </aop:aspect>
</aop:config>

As we can see, we defined a simple bean called simpleAdder, which represents an instance of a Business Object. In addition, we created an instance of an Aspect called AdderAfterReturnAspect.

Of course, XML isn’t our only option here; as mentioned before, AspectJ annotations are fully supported as well.

4.7. Configuration at Glance

We can use tag aop:config for defining AOP-related configuration. Within the config tag, we define the class that represents an aspect. Then we give it a reference of “doAfterReturningAspect,” an aspect bean that we created.

Next we define a Pointcut using the pointcut tag. The pointcut used in the example above is execution(* org.baeldung.logger.SampleAdder+.*(..)), which means apply an advice on any method within the SampleAdder class that accepts any number of arguments and returns any value type.

Then we define which advice we want to apply. In the above example, we applied the after-returning advice. We defined this in our Aspect AdderAfterReturnAspect by executing the afterReturn method that we defined using the attribute method.

This advice within Aspect takes one parameter of type Object. The parameter gives us an opportunity to take an action before and/or after the target method call. In this case, we just log the method’s return value.

Spring AOP supports multiple types of advice using annotation-based config. This and more examples can be found here and here.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we illustrated the concepts used in AOP. We also looked at examples of using the AOP module of Spring. If we want to learn more about AOP, we can look at the following resources:

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.