title: Spring autowired bean for @Aspect aspect is null
body: <p>I have the following spring configuration:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;context:component-scan base-package="uk.co.mysite.googlecontactsync.aop"/&gt;
  
  &lt;bean name="simpleEmailSender" class="uk.co.mysite.util.email.simple.SimpleEmailSenderImplementation"/&gt;
  
  &lt;aop:aspectj-autoproxy/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I have an aspect:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Aspect
  public class SyncLoggingAspect {
      @Autowired
      private SimpleEmailSender simpleEmailSender
  
      @AfterReturning(value="execution(* uk.co.mysite.datasync.polling.Poller+.doPoll())", returning="pusher")
      public void afterPoll(Pusher pusher) {      
          simpleEmailSender.send(new PusherEmail(pusher));
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This aspect works (I can hit a breakpoint on afterPoll) but simpleEmailSender is null. Unfortunately I cannot find clear documentation on why this is.  (For the record, my simpleEmailSender bean exists and is correctly wired into other classes) The following things confuse me:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is context:component-scan supposed to be picking up @Aspect?  If it is then surely it would be a spring managed bean, thus autowired should work?</li>
  <li>If context:component-scan isn't for creating aspects, how is my aspect being created?  I thought aop:aspectj-autoproxy just creates a beanPostProcessor to proxy my @Aspect class?  How would it do this if it isn't a spring managed bean?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Obviously you can tell I don't have an understanding of how things should be working from the ground up.</p>