Chapter 24. Dynamic language support

Chapter 24. Dynamic language support

Chapter 24. Dynamic language support

24.1. Introduction

Spring 2.0 introduces comprehensive support for using classes and objects that have
been defined using a dynamic language (such as JRuby) with Spring.

Why only these languages?

The supported languages were chosen because a) the languages
have a lot of traction in the Java enterprise community, b) no requests were made
for other languages within the Spring 2.0 development timeframe, and
c) the Spring developers were most familiar with them.

There is nothing stopping the inclusion of further languages though. If you want
to see support for <insert your favourite dynamic language here>,
you can always raise an issue on Spring's
JIRA
page (or implement such support yourself).

This support allows you to write any number of classes in a supported dynamic
language, and have the Spring container transparently instantiate, configure
and dependency inject the resulting objects.

The dynamic languages currently supported are:

• JRuby

• Groovy

• BeanShell

Fully working examples of where this dynamic language support can be immediately useful
are described in the section entitled Section 24.4, “Scenarios”.

Please note that the dynamic language support detailed in this chapter is
only available in Spring versions 2.0 and above. Currently
there are no plans to backport the dynamic language
support to previous versions of Spring (most notably the 1.2.x line).