Java – the difference between Advisor and Aspect in AOP

aopjavaspring

I am new to Spring AOP. Based on my understanding, I noticed that both Advisor (for example DefaultPointcutAdvisor) and Aspect (for example the class annotated with @Aspect) can both help to solve the cross-cutting problem by doing something more when a method is invoked.

What is the different between these two term please?

Best Answer

Most aspects are a combination of advice that defines the aspect’s behavior and a pointcut defining where the aspect should be executed.

Spring recognizes this and offers advisors, which combine advice and pointcuts into one object.

More specifically, the PointcutAdvisor does this.

public interface PointcutAdvisor {
   Pointcut getPointcut();
   Advice getAdvice();
}

Most of Spring’s built-in pointcuts also have a corresponding PointcutAdvisor. This is convenient if you want to define a pointcut and the advice it is managing in one place.

Read more in Spring in Action, 3rd Edition

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Java – reflection and why is it useful

The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).

For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.

So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :

Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);

One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.

There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html

And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.

Update from a comment:

The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example is C++

Java – What are the differences between a HashMap and a Hashtable in Java

There are several differences between HashMap and Hashtable in Java:

Hashtable is synchronized, whereas HashMap is not. This makes HashMap better for non-threaded applications, as unsynchronized Objects typically perform better than synchronized ones.
Hashtable does not allow null keys or values. HashMap allows one null key and any number of null values.
One of HashMap's subclasses is LinkedHashMap, so in the event that you'd want predictable iteration order (which is insertion order by default), you could easily swap out the HashMap for a LinkedHashMap. This wouldn't be as easy if you were using Hashtable.

Since synchronization is not an issue for you, I'd recommend HashMap. If synchronization becomes an issue, you may also look at ConcurrentHashMap.

Best Answer

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Java – reflection and why is it useful

Java – What are the differences between a HashMap and a Hashtable in Java

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