What is the most common use for AOP in spring project

Question

After reviewing the AOP pattern, I'm overwhelmed with the ways of how and what to use it for in my spring project.

I'd like to use it as audit log system of all the financial business logic. It just seems to be easy to integrate. But I'd like to hear your take on this.

The question is - what other uses should I consider that are common for this pattern? I would not mind refactoring my current logic to be used with AOP as long as there is benefits to it.

Answer 1

The most common usage is where your application has cross cutting concerns i.e. a piece of logic or code that is going to be written in multiple classes/layers.

And this could vary based on your needs. Some very common examples of these could be:

1. Transaction Management
2. Logging
3. Exception Handling (especially when you may want to have detailed traces or have some plan of recovering from exceptions)
4. Security aspects
5. Instrumentation

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

Besides logging/auditing and declarative transaction handling as mentioned by Axel, I would say another usage of AOP is as a request interceptor. For example, let's say you need all requests coming of a server to be intercepted so that you can do something with it (may be to keep track of which app is sending what request to what other app or what database, etc).