You can use spring  2.0 aspectJ pointcut language without using aspectJ although Spring 2.0 isn't officially released(rc3 at the moment). You can also use Spring 1.2.x BeanNameAutoProxyCreator class to reach for your pointcut. Spring 2.0 is backward compatible to 1.2.x but I remember that I once migrated from 1.2.3 to 2.0-m2 a few month ago and spring MVC upload mechanism couldn't work but as far as I can see, Spring team has worked alot upon this backward compatibility. And I think you must face no major problem. In order not to reinvent the wheel, I suggest that you'd better take a look at Acegi as well...