Wicket has this device called a lazy proxy factory. Given:
<property name="foo" ref="beanx"/>
the idea is to auto-generate a proxy in place of ‘beanx’, and then only initialize beanx if and when something actually calls a method on it.
It seems as if this might be a core Spring capability. Is it there somewhere?
See LazyInitTargetSource; that might do what you want. It requires use of lazy-init=”true” on the target bean as well, though.