Spring 2.5 managed servlets: howto?

Answer 1

I'd suggest restructuring your code - making servlet methods transactional is not a good thing to do. Put the transactional logic in a separate, service class, and either

• obtain these spring-managed classes by WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext().getBean(..) or
• in your servlet init() method obtain the ApplicationContext with the above method and call appCtx.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().autowireBean(this). This way you can inject the transactional classes in your servlet as if it was spring-managed.

Now, you can do all this, but it is definitely not a beautiful way to go. I'd suggest using Spring MVC or any other MVC framework (which support spring integration of its components)

If this is all not possible, as a last resort I think you can use @Configurable (on your servlets) with a <context:load-time-weaver/>.

Answer 2

You can also define your servlets directly in the Spring application context. You'll need a "proxy" servlet registered in web.xml and delegating to the servlet instance which is configured as bean in the applicationContext.xml. Proxy servlet is configured with the name of the target servlet bean, it discovers this bean via WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext().getBean(...) and delegates all the processing to the target servlet. In this case an instance of your servlet is completely managed by Spring.