Saturday March 31, 2007

Making your Spring configuration more "Springy"

In case you missed it (I almost did), Springy 0.2 was released a little over a week ago.

Springy is yet another way to configure Spring without XML. This time, the configuration is done with JRuby. I wanted to cook up an example to show it off, but the following code from Springy's own examples is far cooler than anything I could think of:

DAOS = [ :ZoneDAO, :EmailDomainDAO, :DayDAO, :PreferenceDAO,
                 :WhatEverDao... ]
DAOS.each do |dao|
    bean(dao, "daos.hibernate.#{dao}Hibernate")
      {|b| b.new("sonarSession")}
end

What this code does, in case you're wondering, is use Ruby metaprogramming to create several DAO beans all in just a few lines of code.

One of the interesting new features in 0.2 is a "serialize to XML" feature which transforms the Springy JRuby configuration into good old fashioned Spring XML configuration.

It's still pre-1.0, but this 0.2 release of Springy shows tons of promise and is another very interesting alternative to Spring's XML. Definitely something to look into.