What is load-time weaving?

Question

I am using load-time weaving for a spring (2.5.x) project but I don't know what it is the purpose of it in general. I tried little googling but didn't find the upcoming pages useful. The only thing I understood is that it is something about AOP.

I noticed that it is used for older spring versions also wondering why is that?

Answer 1

Weaving is an AOP concept and it is the phase of integrating the aspects with the targeted code. After weaving, aspects are applied to the original code.

This process can take place in different times like compile and load. This article explains the different weaving times and LTW of AspectJ.

It says about LTW:

Load-time weaving (LTW) is simply binary weaving defered until the point that a class loader loads a class file and defines the class to the JVM.