Pointcut expressions for stereotypes

Some of the new additions to Spring in version 2.5 are annotation-driven configuration, classpath scanning for managed components and @AspectJ support for AOP. These features can gretly reduce the amount of XML needed to configure your application context.

Together with classpath scanning came stereotypes, which, as the reference documentation states, make ideal targets for pointcuts. In putting this idea (stereotype as pointcut target) you may find two different candidate expressions in the documentation (the Service stereotype is used as an example): @target(org.springframework.stereotype.Service) and @within(org.springframework.stereotype.Service) with no clear differentiation between them.

However, some of the differences started to show up as Spring auto-proxying mechanism started to try creating proxies for classes that had no stereotype and were not advised in any other way. After a non-immediate web-searching session, the real problem stood up: if you use @target every class is proxied just in case a new subclass with the annotation is introduced. Even though the issue is marked as resolved, I have suffered it in 2.5.6SEC01.

So, in the meantime, just use @within.