Spring context files organization and best practices

Question

We have started using Spring framework in my project. After becoming acquainted with the basic features (IoC) we have started using spring aop and spring security as well.

The problem is that we now have more than 8 different context files and I feel we didn't give enough thought for the organization of those files and their roles. New files were introduced as the project evolved. We have different context files for: metadata, aop, authorization, services, web resources (it's a RESTful application). So when a developer wants to add a new bean it's not always clear in which file he should add it. We need methodology.

The question:

Is there a best practice for spring files organization?

Should the context files encapsulate layers (DAL , Business Logic, Web) or use cases ? or Flows?

Answer 1

If you're still reasonably early in the project I'd advice you strongly to look at annotation-driven configuration. After converting to annotations we only have 1 xml file with definitions and it's really quite small, and this is a large project. Annotation driven configuration puts focus on your implementation instead of the xml. It also more or less removes the fairly redundant abstraction layer which is the spring "bean name". It turns out the bean name exists mostly because of xml (The bean name still exists in annotation config but is irrelevant in most cases). After doing this switch on a large project everyone's 100% in agreement that it's a lot better and we also have fairly decent evidence that it's a more productive environment.

I'd really recommend anyone who's using spring to switch to annotations. It's possible to mix them as well. If you need transitional advice I suppose it's easy to ask on SO ;)