Is it possible to use a Spring container for DI from inside Eclipse plugins?
I'm wondering because I know that Eclipse causes a lot of issues with class loading, looking up things within the plugin, etc.
The plugin is intended to be distributed as a JAR.
The answer is yes. You can use Spring DM, but you don't have to. It is probably better with it.
I did it without Spring DM and the main concern is class loading issues (not sure if Spring DM solves them, but I guess it should). Assuming you bundle the Spring JAR in a separate plugin with dependencies, you will need to load the context with the class loader of the invoking plugin .
Example:
Plugin A depends on B. When plugin A starts, it will load the application context, when invoking this load, you will need to do something like:
Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(PluginAActivator.class.getClassLoader())
So that the loading of the classes will happen under your own class loader. Now you can use a ClassPathXmlApplicationContext to load configuration XMLs from your class path.
One small note: the default ClassPathXmlApplicationContext validates your XMLs upon loading. You may want to disable it or point your XMLs to a local schema (rather than the standard Spring schema on springframework.org), otherwise, you will connect to the internet to download the schema files upon loading and working offline will fail.