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Showing posts from July, 2010

Load your Spring beans as plug-ins

There are different ways of loading Spring beans in a web application – viz using the dispatcher servlet or the context loader listener. A more modular and flexible approach (which also allows you to minimize coupling and dependencies in your applications) is to load the barebones of your application with the core context loaders and load the rest of your beans in a pluggable way. For example you may be interested in loading your page controllers, business tier and data access code as three separate modules. Off course you can do this and then use import in a main spring config file or a comma separate list in your web.xml where you configure the spring bean definition xmls. But what if you just wanted to drop in a jar with Spring beans and be sure they will be loaded and registered in the container. This also eases the pain of swapping an implementation. The goal is to put all your Spring beans in a particular layer, package it as a jar with one or more configuration file(with one fol