Re: [lists] [Springframework-developer] Expression language for use in ApplicationContext

[Peter d. H. <pe...@de...>]

A richer expression language would have its use cases. The right thing to do
might be to make the language pluggable :^)

A little while ago I rolled a simple generic Validator implementation -- 
configured using the Spring configuration file -- using JEX
(http://www.plotnix.com/jex/). This a little pluggable expression language
framework. I added JEX plugins for regexps and the JSTL expression language
so I could use these (in addition to JavaScript, BEXL and JXPath) to
formulate validation rules. I never fed this back to the list because the
implementation is not quite generic enough (eg there's no i18n support), but
having used it for a while it seems there's a fair bit of mileage in the
idea. A decent expression language is IMHO exactly what's missing from the
brilliant-idea-but-flawed-execution Struts Validator.

In any case, I can think of a number of reasons why it might be good to
adopt JEX or a Spring equivalent of it.

On a not entirely unrelated note, one of the things I've been missing from
Spring is what you might call "anonymous beans". In some situations, I don't
really want to pollute the namespace with beans that will only ever be used
in one place:

   <bean id="foo" class="eg.Foo">
    <property name="bar"><ref bean="bar"/></property>
   </bean>

   <bean id="bar" class="eg.Bar"/>

But would like to be able to write something like

   <bean id="foo" class="eg.Foo">
    <property name="bar"><bean class="eg.Bar"/></property>
   </bean>

Has this been discussed before?

Spring is the best thing I've come across for a while and I'd love to
contribute something back :^)

 - Peter


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Colin Sampaleanu" <col...@ex...>
To: <spr...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 8:17 PM
Subject: [lists] [Springframework-developer] Expression language for use in
ApplicationContext


> Has an expression language available for use in the app context ever
> been considered? (as per email below)
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: Spring XMLBeanFactory
> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:14:42 -0400
> From: Colin Sampaleanu <col...@ex...>
> To: Vladimir Blagojevic <vla...@cs...>
> References: <Pin...@bl...>
>
>
>
> It can't do this (to the best of my knowledge). There is an expression
> language available for use in the JSP tags, but this is not accessible
> in the contexts.
>
> If there is enough of a use case for this it could certainly be done.
> One way would be to try leveraging the existing expression language
> code. I have no idea how easy this would be to do since I've actually
> never touched the web ui code. Another mechanism would be to bring in
> something like OGNL, which is quite powerful...
>
> What is your usage scenario?
>
>
> Vladimir Blagojevic wrote:
>
> >Colin,
> >
> >Does XMLBeanFactory support reading property of bean X and assigning it
> >to bean Y within declarative xml config file? I don't think so, but is
> >there any chatter on the lists about that?
> >
> >Cheers
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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