6.8 Spring integration

For a Restlet or a resource class to do something useful, it will likely need access to the beans declared in your module's Spring container.

The module's Spring container is used for instantiating all classes specified in the routing configuration using the ofClass attribute, as well as the JAX-RS resource and provider classes.

What this means is that Spring will create the instance of the class, and honor the Spring-related annotations on it. Spring will however not manage the complete life-cycle of the object, so e.g. @Destroy annotations will not be honored.

The  most useful is Spring's Autowired annotation. Below is an example of its usage. The system will automatically look up a bean in your Spring container of the 'MessageService' type. If there would be multiple of those, then there are additional annotations to select the correct implementation. See the Spring documentation for more information.

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired

public class MessageResource {
    private MessageService messageService

    @Autowired
    void setMessageService(MessageService messageService) {
        this.messageService = messageService;
    }
}