newbie question concerning aspectjweaver.jar

[Florian Grundig]

Hello Community,

I´m new to Spring-AOP and have a question concerning aspectjweaver.jar.

first the story:

I tried to do some performance-logging with the JamonPerformanceMonitorInterceptor which is included in spring.jar (2.5.6).

In my aspects-configuration.xml i´ve defined something like:

	<aop:config>
		<aop:pointcut id="jamonMonitoringPointcut"
			expression="execution(* x.y.MyClass.refresh(..))" />

		<aop:advisor pointcut-ref="jamonMonitoringPointcut"
			advice-ref="jamonMonitoringAspectInterceptor" />
	</aop:config>

	<!-- Performance Monitoring Bean-->
	<bean class="org.springframework.aop.interceptor.JamonPerformanceMonitorInterceptor"
		id="jamonMonitoringAspectInterceptor">

		<property name="loggerName" value="Profiler" />
	</bean>

Everything works fine (every refresh methode is correct logged) when i´ve include the aspectjweaver.jar in my classpath.
If i´ve not included aspectjweaver.jar in my classpath, i get an exception while starting my application:

...
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.aspectj.weaver.reflect.ReflectionWorld$ReflectionWorldException

1. I thought i only need to include aspectjweaver.jar in my classpath, if i want to enable @AspectJ support (spring documentation 6.2.2).
What does is mean 'to enable @AspectJ support'? I haven´t used some aspectj-style annotations.

2. Is it possible to uses the JamonPerformanceMonitorInterceptor with using some XML based pointcut expressions like defined above without to include this aspectjweaver.jar?

thanks

[ramnivas]

Spring uses classes in aspectjweaver.jar to parse pointcut expressions and making matching decisions. In your case, you will need to have aspectjweaver.jar in the classpath.

-Ramnivas

[Florian Grundig]

thank you ramnivas,

you said in my case i need to have aspectjweaver.jar in the classpath,
but if this jar is needed to parse pointcut expressions and making matching decisions,
then it´s needed in nearly every case, when you want to use aspects (except for example creating proxys with org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactoryBean and some interceptors).

If this jar is needed in nearly every case - why isn´t it a spring module and included in the spring.jar?

The aspectjweaver.jar is about 1.5 MByte big -> 5 times bigger than the spring-core module itself.
I want to use only spring-aop with proxy style - no aspectj - is there a possibility to use a smaller jar?

[ramnivas]

It isn't a spring module jar because it is from a different project (AspectJ). If the jar file size is a concern (on most projects, it isn't), you may try using aspectjrt.jar and org.aspectj.matcher.jar from AspectJ distribution.

-Ramnivas