I have been working on spring based server that has few servlets [DWR, OpenAmf, Spring's MVC and Hibernate]. I needed to use Rest for providing API functionality. Problem: The examples in Wiki demonstrate loading spring beans and accessing them using Spring Extension and Spring context. When I started working, I missed it andeventually got it working and it works fine.
I have few questions / doubts though. What I do? I am using spring's WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext() to get the spring context (hence I am using already available functionality and do not need Spring extension). For this to work, I just made 2 minor changes: 1. Added ServletContext attribute to Application class. 2. In ServerServlet class, I simply do application.setServletContext(getServletContext()). 3. In my RestApplication extends Application createRoot(), I simply do getSpringContext() and pass it to WebApplicationContextUtils. I would like to know, if this approach is good? It helps me in a huge way, as I was able to wire Targets in my application.xml, which directly reference beans in appServices. All these XMLs as listed in web.xml context-param <contextConfigLocation>. It provides me uniform wiring, as previous contexts. Furthermore, following spring's philosophy, the application.xml is now in web.xml, instead of hard-coded in the RestApplication class. I am not sure which is better approach? Is having ServletContext in Application ok? All in all, Restlet is a wonderful framework, thanks a lot Jerome.
