Until now, we have used the word "target" to define the object that receives the calls from a caller object, where a proxy was interposed to add logic contained in advices.
In this interposition mechanism, Spring puts at our disposal the interface org.springframework.aop.TargetSource, which returns the object target.
public interface TargetSource {
Class getTargetClass();
boolean isStatic();
Object getTarget() throws Exception;
void releaseTarget(Object target) throws Exception;
}
This interface is interesting as it permits target pooling and hot swapping.
Without specifying the targetSource, the default implementation that wraps the local object is returned and also the target is returned for all the following invocations.