Is it possible to run Spring without an application server?

Question

I have an application which should run only on standard JVM - no application servers like JBoss or Tomcat. Is it possible to run it with Spring (I need spring-jdbc) configured normally through applicationContext.xml? I havent't found any tutorial.

SOLUTION

First part is from the answers below and the second part is (in my case) adding this into pom.xml.

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <archive>
                    <manifest>
                        <mainClass>package.MainClass</mainClass>
                    </manifest>
                </archive>
                <descriptorRefs>
                    <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
                </descriptorRefs>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Answer 1

Yes, it can be just a dependency injection framework.

Here's an example with Swing: Spring & Swing

All you need is to load your context in a Main method or somwhere using ClassPathXmlApplicationContext or similar.

ApplicationContext context = 
    new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml")

Answer 2

Yes - all you need is JVM to launch java main class that makes use of Spring FW.

here is the example of context.xml and a code that uses it to initialize Spring JDBC:

<!-- DATASOURCE used for object stores -->
<bean id="dataSourceForObjects" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource"
    destroy-method="close">
    <property name="driverClassName" value="com.${job.repository.db.type}.jdbc.Driver" />
    <property name="url" value="jdbc:${job.repository.db.type}://${db.host}:${job.repository.db.port}/${db.schema}" />
    <property name="username" value="${db.user}" />  <!-- your user id. e.g. root-->
    <property name="password" value="${db.password}" /> <!-- your password-->
    <property name="maxIdle" value="10" />
    <property name="maxActive" value="100" />
    <property name="maxWait" value="10000" />
    <property name="validationQuery" value="select 1" />
    <property name="testOnBorrow" value="false" />
    <property name="testWhileIdle" value="true" />
    <property name="timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis" value="1200000" />
    <property name="minEvictableIdleTimeMillis" value="1800000" />
    <property name="numTestsPerEvictionRun" value="5" />
    <property name="defaultAutoCommit" value="true" />
</bean>
    <bean id="objectStoreDao" class="com.pursway.core.dao.objectStore.ObjectStoreJdbcImpl">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSourceForObjects"/>
</bean>

here is the java code example:

...
ApplicationContext context = new FileSystemXmlApplicationContext(ExecutionController.BASIC_CONFIG_FILES);
jobExplorer = (JobExplorer)context.getBean("jobExplorer");
workFlowDao = (WorkFlowDao)context.getBean("workFlowDao");
....

Good luck !