Spring DM with Annotations

A couple of days ago, I implemented a sample application, based on Spring Dynamic Modules (DM) 1.2.0, with its annotation extension. Unfortunately the documentation doesn't contain any sample code, which might cause some unnecessary work, if you are not too familiar with Spring DM.

Spring DM's annotation extension allows you to pull in an OSGi service reference by annotating a setter of a property:


Unfortunately, you don't get rid of the XML configuration completely, but that's not so bad after all, because you still want to let Spring to all your wiring:


In addition to the instantion part, you need to configure a BeanPostProcessor. It tells Spring to handle your methods annotated with @ServiceReference. If you want all your bundles to use annotations, this might get a little tedious. That's why you can configure annotation processing for all bundles, by defining a fragment bundle, which overrides the default configuration of Spring DM's extender:


Unfortunately, the configuration of the fragement bundle is not in the offical documentation.

Now, that you've got a glimpse of how to use annotations with Spring DM and the ways of configuring it, you might ask whether you want to use it or not? For me this boils down to the question, whether you want to have your dependencies in your xml file or in your code?

It's a tricky question and I think annotations only bring real value, if they make your life easier. Let's take a look at Spring's Web MVC for example: before annotations were introduced, you had to implement an interface in order to code a controller and thus you had dependencies on javax.servlet in your controller code. Spring Web MVC's annotation approach still leaves you with the dependency on Spring, but eliminates the javax.servlet dependency.

In addition to that, it improves testability of controller classes significantly, which I think is worth living with the dependency on Spring.

I think, that the features of Spring DM annotations, at least at the moment, are not compelling enough to have dependencies on it in your code. With the right tooling, Spring's XML configuration should be as easy to handle as annotations.