Dynamic Language Support in Spring

Spring supports the use of scripts. In other words, create a bean in Groovy, Jruby and call it as a normal bean from our application.

However, when I tried to use this feature of Spring, even with the last up-to-date version (3.1.1), many errors arise, due to the lack of proper libraries.

Many forums recall to the use of Maven to download properly these missing jars, but I don't want to use it. Other forums give solutions that are not solutions at all, so I've decided to collect these notes.

You can find this missing class in this sourceforge project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/aopalliance

However the 'default' file for download is an incorrect one: an alpha version that doesn't work. Look into the files section to get the latest version.

You have to download Groovy.

I made the following:

1. Download Groovy (binary release)
2. Unzip the file and locate the “embedable” directory in it: it contains a single jar file with all the groovy
3. Add it to your project

Here is my working example of my –still very simple– groovy bean:

	<lang:groovy id="customField"
				script-source="classpath:com/supermanhamuerto/nestor/actions/CustomFieldImpl.groovy"
				scope="prototype">
		<lang:property name="message" value="Hello from groovy!!!!"/>
	</lang:groovy>

If you have put your script into the package “com.supermanhamuerto.nestor.actions”, you must specify the complete path into the script-source attribute.