I don’t tend to use it myself (preferring the “spec” mechanism built-in to Stringtree), but today someone asked me if a Mojasef application could work with Spring.

After a bit of thought, some downloading, and a little playing, here is the result. My intention was to allow beans configured in a Spring application context to act as first-class citizens within a Stringtree context, so that they can be used seamlessly inside Mojasef application code and templates.

The implementation was actually pretty simple, essentially consisting of creating a class which implements org.stringtree.Fetcher and provides access to any Spring beans within a Spring context.

package org.stringtree.spring;

import org.springframework.beans.BeansException;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory;
import org.stringtree.Fetcher;

public class SpringFetcher implements Fetcher {

	private BeanFactory factory;

	public SpringFetcher(BeanFactory factory) {
		this.factory = factory;
	}

	public Object getObject(String name) {
		Object ret = null;
		try {
			ret = factory.getBean(name);
		} catch(BeansException e) {
			ret = null;
		}

		return ret;
	}
}

To use this class, you will need to create an instance of it, passing in a Spring BeanFactory or ApplicationContext object to the constructor. Then the SpringFetcher object can be used just as any other Fetcher.

It seems that when using Spring in a Mojasef application, what will likely be needed is a single Mojasef context which provides access to both Mojasef and Spring objects. To achieve this, simply wrap the two Fetchers in a FallbackFetcher:

	Fetcher spring = new SpringFetcher(new XmlBeanFactory(new FileSystemResource("application.xml")));
	Fetcher map = new MapFetcher();
	Fetcher ff = new FallbackFetcher(spring, map);

An example Eclipse project containing the SpringFetcher class, some unit tests, and the jar files to compile and run them is available in sourceforge subversion at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/stringtree/projects/spring_example/trunk.

Posted by Stringtree in Mojasef, Projects