title: spring aspects working without explicit definition in application context
body: <p>In my project, I have an aspect defined as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Aspect
  public class UselessAspect {
  
  @Around("execution(* com.x.y.UselessClass.*.*(..))")
  public Object logAroundUselessClassMethods(ProceedingJoinPoint joinPoint) throws Throwable {
          // following method does exist and its doing whats desired
          return logBeforeAndAfterTheMethod(joinPoint);
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I do not have anything like following in my application context:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;bean id="uselessAspect" class="com.z.UselessAspect" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My question is - why is my aspect working as expected? My perception was that the aspect is required to be in spring application context. What is the difference between having that aspect in application context and not having that aspect in application context?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <p>In my applicationcontext.xml, I only have</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;context:spring-configured/&gt;
  &lt;context:component-scan base-package="com"&gt;&lt;/context:component-scan&gt;
  </code></pre>