One group of classes that may benefit from using dynamic-language-backed beans is that of Spring MVC controllers. In pure Spring MVC applications, the navigational flow through a web application is to a large extent determined by code encapsulated within your Spring MVC controllers. As the navigational flow and other presentation layer logic of a web application needs to be updated to respond to support issues or changing business requirements, it may well be easier to effect any such required changes by editing one or more dynamic language source files and seeing those changes being immediately reflected in the state of a running application.

Remember that in the lightweight architectural model espoused by projects such as Spring, you are typically aiming to have a really thin presentation layer, with all the meaty business logic of an application being contained in the domain and service layer classes. Developing Spring MVC controllers as dynamic-language-backed beans allows you to change presentation layer logic by simply editing and saving text files; any changes to such dynamic language source files will (depending on the configuration) automatically be reflected in the beans that are backed by dynamic language source files.

	Note
	In order to effect this automatic 'pickup' of any changes to dynamic-language-backed beans, you will have had to enable the 'refreshable beans' functionality. See Section 26.3.1.2, “Refreshable beans” for a full treatment of this feature.

Find below an example of an org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.Controller implemented using the Groovy dynamic language.

// from the file '/WEB-INF/groovy/FortuneController.groovy'
package org.springframework.showcase.fortune.web

import org.springframework.showcase.fortune.service.FortuneService
import org.springframework.showcase.fortune.domain.Fortune
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.Controller

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse

class FortuneController implements Controller {

    @Property FortuneService fortuneService

    ModelAndView handleRequest(
            HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse httpServletResponse) {

        return new ModelAndView("tell", "fortune", this.fortuneService.tellFortune())
    }
}

<lang:groovy id="fortune"
             refresh-check-delay="3000"
             script-source="/WEB-INF/groovy/FortuneController.groovy">
    <lang:property name="fortuneService" ref="fortuneService"/>
</lang:groovy>

Another area of application development with Spring that may benefit from the flexibility afforded by dynamic-language-backed beans is that of validation. It may be easier to express complex validation logic using a loosely typed dynamic language (that may also have support for inline regular expressions) as opposed to regular Java.

Again, developing validators as dynamic-language-backed beans allows you to change validation logic by simply editing and saving a simple text file; any such changes will (depending on the configuration) automatically be reflected in the execution of a running application and would not require the restart of an application.

	Note
	Please note that in order to effect the automatic 'pickup' of any changes to dynamic-language-backed beans, you will have had to enable the 'refreshable beans' feature. See Section 26.3.1.2, “Refreshable beans” for a full and detailed treatment of this feature.

Find below an example of a Spring org.springframework.validation.Validator implemented using the Groovy dynamic language. (See Section 5.2, “Validation using Spring's Validator interface” for a discussion of the Validator interface.)

import org.springframework.validation.Validator
import org.springframework.validation.Errors
import org.springframework.beans.TestBean

class TestBeanValidator implements Validator {

    boolean supports(Class clazz) {
        return TestBean.class.isAssignableFrom(clazz)
    }
    
    void validate(Object bean, Errors errors) {
        if(bean.name?.trim()?.size() > 0) {
            return
        }
        errors.reject("whitespace", "Cannot be composed wholly of whitespace.")
    }
}