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

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 .

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).