There is a possibility to configure spring framework only in java. Yep no XML 
.
There is a project spring-java-config. This project aims to provide a way to configure spring without XML. To use it with maven you should add repository to your pom and dependency
<repository> <id>spring-milestone</id> <name>Spring Milestone Repository</name> <url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/milestone</url> </repository> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.javaconfig</groupId> <artifactId>spring-javaconfig</artifactId> <version>1.0.0.m3</version> </dependency>
One thing to mention is to setup java 5 compiler, because spring java config use annotation.
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<source>1.5</source>
<target>1.5</target>
<encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
</configuration>
</plugin>
This config will provide as all the dependencies, we can start to configure our beans. The class which has bean configuration must be annotated by @Configuration annotation, and methods with @Bean annotation is equivalent to element. Resume : klas with @Configuration equals xml file with beans, and method with @Bean equals element.
And the last thing is to use JavaConfigApplicationContext which accepts as constructor class annotated with @Configuration property. Below the main class.
And this is basis, we can probably stop here but I provide some additional information. Depends on method visibility our bean is visible or not in the context.
- The standard set of *Aware interfaces are supported.
- You can use scopes, autowire and others features known from xml configuration
- @Import is equivalent of xml’s <import>, and JavaConfigApplicationContext accepts more than one class as constructor parameter.
- For web application we can use JavaConfigWebApplicationContext
I’m still watching the future of the project. Stay tuned