Aspect Oriented Programing

• Aspect - Think of this as the general feature you want to apply globally to your application (logging, performance monitoring, exception handling, transaction management, etc).
• Advice - A chunk of code that is invoked during program execution, and is a piece of the logic for implementing your aspect. This is the first important piece of a Spring AOP aspect implementation! I like to compare advice implementations to the decorator pattern. While an advice doesn't necessarily wrap an entire object in concept, it has the same general effect. We'll learn in a bit that how that advice is applied is more granular/formal than typically defined in the decorator pattern however.
• Joinpoint - A *single* location in the code where an advice should be executed (such as field access, method invocation , constructor invocation, etc.). Spring's built-in AOP only supports method invocation currently, so joinpoints aren't particularly important to focus on at this point.
• Pointcut - A pointcut is a set of many joinpoints where an advice should be executed. So if, in Spring, a joinpoint is always a method invocation, then a pointcut is just a set of methods that, when called, should have advices invoked around them. This is the second important pieces of a Spring AOP aspect implementation!
• Targets/Target Objects - The objects you want to apply an aspect or set of aspects to!
• Introduction - This is the ability to add methods to an object. This is closely tied to, and is almost analogous to the term 'mixins'. It's really just a way to make an object of type A also an object of type B. Introduction in Spring is limited to interfaces.