Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework

This is not a complete introduction to AOP. We assume knowledge of basic AOP concepts. We will not be making the case for AOP. In 2005, we believe that should no longer be necessary.

You should be able to understand the examples in this chapter without deep knowledge of AOP. You can use Spring's AOP capabilities to address common problems such as transaction management without detailed knowledge of AOP. However, we recommend that you increase your understanding of AOP to enable you to make the most of this powerful feature of Spring.

Please see the "References" section later in this chapter for recommended reading. For a discussion of AOP that helps to explain the motivation for Spring's AOP framework, see Chapter 8 of J2EE without EJB (Wrox, 2004).