[Springframework-developer] BeanFactoryBootstrap

[Rod J. <rod...@in...>]

Is anyone using, or does anyone have suggestions as to how to improve, the
BeanFactoryBootstrap class (in beans.factory.support)?

I'm inclined to demote it to the sandbox, unless it can be made
significantly more useful.

The motivation was to provide a generic way of configuring a BeanFactory on
those occasions when a BeanFactory had to be loaded as a singleton.

It works by looking at System properties to find a bean definition called
"bootstrapBeanFactory". The problem with this is that most BeanFactory
implementations, like the XmlBeanFactory, are not JavaBeans, and hence can't
easily be configured themselves via a BeanFactory.

I did also once consider supporting alternative sources of
properties--properties file on classpath etc--that could be searched in a
documented order.

Is this a potentially useful piece of functionality that we should get
right? Or should we just leave users to write their own custom singletons if
they really need to bootstrap via a Singleton rather than a J2EE hook like
ServletContext?

Regards,
Rod