Question

I’ve been using spring.net with xml configuration for some times, and I just saw that spring team released CodeConfig a month ago.

What I like about the xml config is that if I have a problem on the live server I can easily change the xml configuration to enable some specific debugging settings, or disable a specific component simply changing the xml configuration.

What is the advantage of using a code configuration instead of an xml configuration other than compile time check?

Answer 1

With code config, possible benefits you could get are:

• Better refactoring support; e.g. renaming an injected property
• More compact configuration, compared to xml
• Developers can use code, in which they are often more at home than in xml

Benefit of the last point is also that developers new to the framework will have a significantly less steep learning curve than with the xml config.

From the docs:

While there are several positive
aspects to expressing configuration
metadata in XML files, there are also
many problems with this approach
including the verbosity of XML and its
heavy dependence on string-literals
which are both prone to typing errors
and unusually resistant to most modern
refactoring tools in use today. The
CodeConfig approach removes these
problems by providing a type safe,
code-based, approach to dependency
injection. It keeps the configuration
metadatda external to your class so
your class can be a POCO, free of any
DI related annotations.