Spring AOP - @AfterReturning does not work

I have a Java method, getAllItems(), and I created an aspect method, which is called after getAllItems() ends.

@Repository
@Scope("prototype")
public class ItemDao {
    // not using database connection for this question; the program works fine, except aspects
    public List<String> getIAllItems() {
        List<String> items = new ArrayList();
        items.add("item1");
        return items;
    }
}

The aspect class is this:

import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.AfterReturning;
import org.aspectj.lang.annotation.Aspect;
import java.util.List;

@Aspect
public class MyAspects {

    @AfterReturning(pointcut = "execution(* ro.telacad.dao.ItemDao.getIAllItems(..))", returning="items")
    public void afterGetAllItems(List<String> items) {
        System.out.println(items);
    }
}

So, after calling getAllItems() I expect to see in console printed "[item1]", but the aspect method is not called. There is no error in console, and the application, except aspects, works fine. So I consider all the spring beans are created.

In appConfig.xml, the beans are declared like this:

<context:component-scan base-package="ro.telacad.*" />
<aop:aspectj-autoproxy/>

My question is what I did wrong for aspects.

MyAspects is not picked up by Spring's component scanning as it does not have the @Component annotation, and neither has @Aspect. @Repository does have the annotation.

Either add the @Component annotation to MyAspects, or explicitly declare the bean in your XML config:

<bean id="myAspects" class="com.yourpackage.MyAspects">
...
</bean>