Spring-DM, Aries Blueprint and custom namespaces
Since Spring 2.0, Spring supports custom namespace handlers. This feature is really useful and can be used to reduce the verbosity of your spring based applications. Spring-DM has brought this feature along, so it's also available in an OSGi environment. Unfortunately, the integration of those namespace handlers leads to a lot of problems, mostly due to the legacy spring way of configuring the handlers which does not map well at all in OSGi. In a standard environment, Spring lives in a simple classloader. The classloader which is used to create the spring application is not supposed to change at any time, and everything that is needed for the application is supposed to be available from that classloader. So let's see what happens with custom namespace handlers. Spring detects custom namespace handlers through the presence of a file in the following location META-INF/spring.handlers. This file contains the name of the class supporting a given namespace. In a non OSGi en...