Question

I want to write a simple servlet in JBoss which will call a method on a Spring bean. The purpose is to allow a user to kick off an internal job by hitting a URL.

What is the easiest way to get hold of a reference to my Spring bean in the servlet?

JBoss web services allow you to inject a WebServiceContext into your service class using an @Resource annotation. Is there anything comparable that works in plain servlets? A web service to solve this particular problem would be using a sledgehammer to crush a nut.

Answer 1

Your servlet can use WebApplicationContextUtils to get the application context, but then your servlet code will have a direct dependency on the Spring Framework.

Another solution is configure the application context to export the Spring bean to the servlet context as an attribute:

<bean class='org.springframework.web.context.support.ServletContextAttributeExporter'>   <property name='attributes'>     <map>       <entry key='jobbie' value-ref='springifiedJobbie'/>     </map>   </property> </bean> 

Your servlet can retrieve the bean from the servlet context using

SpringifiedJobbie jobbie = (SpringifiedJobbie) getServletContext().getAttribute('jobbie');