Is it possible to use Spring AOP without creating beans?

Question

Spring AOP depends on proxy mechanism - J2SE dynamic proxies or using CGLIB(according to the spring documentation). Is it possible to use the AOP mechanism defined by Spring without creating/declaring the beans in the spring application context?

If its not possible with Spring - is AspectJ's Load time Weaving(LTW) or Compile Time Weaving (CTW) would help resolve the issue?

Requirement : Trying to implement logging and transaction management for a old project of mine without declaring the POJO's as spring beans.

You can use aspectj and weavers with spring's @Configurable. — Sotirios Delimanolis, Apr 30 '14 at 17:35
However logging with a framework like log4j would probably be harder because of the timing on classes being loaded. — Sotirios Delimanolis, Apr 30 '14 at 17:36
[here is a question related to logging by aspects using spring-aop vs aspectj](http://stackoverflow.com/q/19068725/1113392) — A4L, Apr 30 '14 at 17:41
@SotiriosDelimanolis Spring can use AspectJ annotations but it will use its own AOP-light mode which only works within its context. — gizmo, Apr 30 '14 at 18:11

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 30 '14 at 17:27

2

No, you have to put them under Spring's control. You can't ask Spring to advise beans that it doesn't know about.

No calls to "new"; have to replace those with application context.

answered Apr 30 '14 at 17:27

duffymo

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 30 '14 at 18:07

As stated by @duffymo Spring can only operate on beans declared within its context.

AspectJ, both LTW and CTW, can be used to achieve what you want.

Another tools you might consider is Byteman, which operate at a lower level but has also a lower overhead if performance is an issue for you.

Is it possible to use Spring AOP without creating beans?

2 Answers2