[Springframework-developer] Configuring External Services with Spring?

[Bryant H. <bry...@ho...>]

Hi,
  So we use Spring quite a bit at my job, but we also have some older =
services that are created and configured using a legacy framework.  It =
occurred to me that even if the legacy framework creates the services, =
using the Spring style XML and dependency injection would be a big =
improvement over the configuration strategy of our legacy framework.

  Does anyone know of a techinique for defining a bean definition in =
Spring, but having Spring apply that configuration to an external =
service instead of creating a new object?  Also what happens if the =
external service is not yet available while Spring is starting?

  My first thought was to define a custom 'scope' in Spring, but it =
looks like with Scopes Spring still creates the objects and just shares =
them with some external storage (such as an HttpSession or HttpRequest, =
etc).  In my case I don't want Spring to create the object, just apply =
its configuration.

Thanks,

Bryant