I'm curious about your thoughts on using the ibatis DAO over the Spring stuff? I'm really only using Spring for being able to extend SqlMapClientDaoSupport. I'm not doing anything super cool with swapping out test dao's etc with a different implementation, so I'm thinking using the preferred Spring approach could be overkill due to what I want...
One of the concerns I have is I want others to be able to use my persistence jar in other projects. I think forcing them to use Spring, at least for look ups, could be a bad idea. For example say I have a dao or service that I want to use from another jar... I want to be able to do something like: UserDAO.getInstance().getUser(id); instead of relying on that dao being injected into the implementer's code via spring. Having spring do the injection of the sqlMapClients in my persistence jar though will I think require that getInstance method will complicate things since I'll have to get access to Spring's ApplicationContext and probably make some objects AppliactionContextAware etc. I don't mind giving up Spring in this case, but am I giving up a lot not using the SpringDAO implementation? How do other's make their persistence stuff reusable if they end up using Spring? - don't you then up forcing the end user' to have to create a spring-context.xml file? I'd like to avoid that.
