I recently had a similar question Why does spring throw an aspectj error if it does not depend on aspectj?
To use Spring AoP without an AspectJ dependency it must be done in xml. The annotations are a part of AspectJ.
Also, the really cool expression language is only supported by AspectJ. So you have to define explicit point-cuts. See Section 6.3.2. Declaring a pointcut: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/aop.html section
I'm still having trouble finding any elaborate documentation on this technique.
