26. Dynamic language support
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26. Dynamic language support

26.1 Introduction

Why only these languages?

The supported languages were chosen because a) the languages have a lot of traction in the Java enterprise community, b) no requests were made for other languages within the Spring 2.0 development timeframe, and c) the Spring developers were most familiar with them.

There is nothing stopping the inclusion of further languages though. If you want to see support for <insert your favourite dynamic language here>, you can always raise an issue on Spring's JIRA page (or implement such support yourself).

Spring 2.0 introduces comprehensive support for using classes and objects that have been defined using a dynamic language (such as JRuby) with Spring. This support allows you to write any number of classes in a supported dynamic language, and have the Spring container transparently instantiate, configure and dependency inject the resulting objects.

The dynamic languages currently supported are:

  • JRuby 0.9 / 1.0

  • Groovy 1.0 / 1.5

  • BeanShell 2.0

Fully working examples of where this dynamic language support can be immediately useful are described in Section 26.4, “Scenarios”.

Note: Only the specific versions as listed above are supported in Spring 2.5. In particular, JRuby 1.1 (which introduced many incompatible API changes) is not supported at this point of time.

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