[Springframework-developer] BeanFactoryLocator iinterface and some implementations checked in

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

(resent, the initial email from last night seems to have gone into a 
black hole; probably it will show up in a day or two).

I've checked in a new interface called BeanFactoryLocator. It replaces 
the existing BeanFactoryLoader interface, with the old concrete 
implementations XmlBeanFactoryLoader and 
XmlBeanFactoryApplicationContextLoader now implementing 
BeanFactoryLocator, and renamed to SimpleJndiBeanFactoryLocator and 
JndiBeanFactoryLocator, respectively. The latter is the default used by 
the EJB support classes.

As well, there are two new classes implementing BeanFactoryLocator, 
called SingletonBeanFactoryLocator and DefaultBeanFactoryLocator. These 
implement a 'keyed-singleton' bean factory access mechanism. The latter 
class simply uses an ApplicationContext internally instead of the 
former's BeanFactory. Essentialy, the classes use a
BeanFactory or ApplicationContext definition (which becomes a singleton, 
keyed by the name of the definition file(s)) to load one or more 
BeanFactories or ApplicationContexts, and return them to the caller.

I am by no means a big fan of using singleton's, but they have some uses 
in glue code some times. As such, I have heavily plastered the JavaDocs 
with warnings not to use these classes in most circumstances.

Given that we are so close to RC1, if somebody doesn't like any of the 
class names, method names, packages, implementation, etc., please speak 
up. Also, these changes break compatibility with any old code overriding 
the default BeanFactoryLoader in the ejb support classes. I thought it 
was worth it to do this in order to consolidate two fairly similar 
interfaces. Changing to use the new code should be fairly trivial for 
anybody affected.

Regards,
Colin