Question

I came across the following Spring AOP pointcut in a tutorial:

execution(public * * (..))

it was said that it would cause the execution of all public methods. Is that correct? AFAIK we can only intercept public methods, and that public keyword there is even illegal.

Answer 1

In addition to @Mario’s answer, the spring docs on AOP say the following (emphasis mine):

Note Due to the proxy-based nature of Spring’s AOP framework,
protected methods are by definition not intercepted, neither for JDK
proxies (where this isn’t applicable) nor for CGLIB proxies (where
this is technically possible but not recommendable for AOP purposes).
As a consequence, any given pointcut will be matched against public
methods only!

If your interception needs include protected/private methods or even
constructors, consider the use of Spring-driven native AspectJ weaving
instead of Spring’s proxy-based AOP framework. This constitutes a
different mode of AOP usage with different characteristics, so be sure
to make yourself familiar with weaving first before making a decision.

In addition, the pointcut grammer is as follows:

execution(modifiers-pattern? ret-type-pattern declaring-type-pattern?
          name-pattern(param-pattern) throws-pattern?)

Wherby the modifier-pattern would be public,protected etc but is optional…