[Springframework-developer] Absense of tooling SPI documentation / Namespace handlers and runtime dependencies

[Taras T. <mai...@gm...>]

Hi,

Various tooling-related aspects of Spring 2.0 are mentioned in this blog 
entry by Rod Johnson:
http://blog.interface21.com/main/2007/01/21/spring-ide-powering-ahead/

In particular, Rod mentions two interesting points:
1) Refactoring of the core container to support better tooling.

I've been searching for any documentation for supported tooling 
scenarios, without results. There's JIRA issue SPR-1919, which after 
almost a year received the following comment - on april 1st :-)
"I'll address this in the timeframe of 'when-someone-asks-about-it'."

This comment would be funny, if not for the almost complete absence of 
JavaDoc on methods close to the "core container": ParserContext, 
XmlReaderContext, etc.

2) Access of container configuration without access to bean classes.

Rod also mentions the possibility to query the container without 
instantiating or even accessing bean classes. I have a hard time 
understanding how this would work, as every namespace handler included 
with spring directly references the class of the bean to be created.
For example, look at:
--
Class AbstractSingleBeanDefinitionParser#getBeanClass(Element)
--

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, is there some sample / test code available 
that loads a context definition (including custom namespaces), without 
access to the bean classes?

Regards,
-tt