I have a confusion about Spring transaction management. In my application I implemented transaction management using @Transactional in the service class. And I configured my spring.xml is like:

    <beans:bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
            <beans:property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
            <beans:property name="configLocation" value="classpath:hibernate.cfg.xml"/>                              
            <beans:property name="hibernateProperties">
                <beans:props>
                    <beans:prop key="hibernate.dialect">${jdbc.dialect}</beans:prop>
                    <beans:prop key="hibernate.show_sql">false</beans:prop>
                    <beans:prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">update</beans:prop>
                </beans:props>
            </beans:property>
        </beans:bean>  
        <!-- Transaction manager -->
            <beans:bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.HibernateTransactionManager">
                <beans:property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory" />
            </beans:bean> 

If I implement transaction management in the configuration file like below without using @Transactional in the service class:

    <aop:pointcut id="defaultServiceOperation"
            expression="execution(* x.y.service.*Service.*(..))"/>

    <aop:pointcut id="noTxServiceOperation"
            expression="execution(* x.y.service.ddl.DefaultDdlManager.*(..))"/>

    <aop:advisor pointcut-ref="defaultServiceOperation" advice-ref="defaultTxAdvice"/>

    <aop:advisor pointcut-ref="noTxServiceOperation" advice-ref="noTxAdvice"/>

</aop:config>

does it give me any benefits over @Transactional? Someone told me using @Transactional is also implementation of AOP in spring. Can anyone explain me how?