I have to admit, I was very impressed with Ryan Breidenbach’s Spring JavaConfig talk tonight at the Spring Dallas User Group. I don’t hide the fact that I’m a big fan of xml configuration, and very much against annotation-driven config. However, I don’t think I have a problem with doing my bean wiring in Java. I’ll have to sleep on it, and then look at some code and blogs tomorrow before I yeah or neah it, but I kind of liked what I saw tonight.
One of the keys behind xml config, is having a central location to see how your app is wired, and you still have that with JavaConfig. You get stronger type safety, there is no need to cast your bean from Object, and you get built-in IDE refactoring. Ryan did a nice job showing off a lot of advanced bean-wiring methods in JavaConfig.
If you want to learn more about Spring JavaConfig go to the source and read more at the projects homepage.