Using Spring Factories with Groovy

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This script relies on no external wiring files. Everything is configured in the script itself. If we wish to alter our system at a later time, we simply alter the configuration inside the configure() method. In the Java world, this wouldn't be very flexible, but in the Groovy world, this script may be executed from source code (even dynamically loaded when it changes) so altering the configuration doesn't necessarily require a new build.

Classical Spring Approach

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import org.springframework.context.support.GenericApplicationContext
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner

def ctx = new GenericApplicationContext()
new ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner(ctx).scan('')
ctx.refresh()
def calc = ctx.getBean('calcImpl3')
println calc.doAdd(3, 4) // => 7

This example uses features in Spring 2.1 (currently at a Milestone release) and Groovy 1.1 (currently in beta release) on a Java 5 or greater JVM.

BeanBuilder Approach

We can also use the BeanBuilder from Grails to avoid writing an XML file. It will look something like this (after adding the latest Grails jar to your classpath):

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