New Spring 2.0 namespace

lee esto en español

A bit unusual way for configuring the Spring beans seems to be the one Rod Johnson reminds us in this entry of his blog.
Basically a new "p" namespace allows us to use XML attributes instead of nested properties to configure the beans.
What we usually do in this way:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">

   <bean id="employee" class="package.Employee">
     <property name="company" ref="Company" />
     <property name="weeklyHours" value="35" />
   </bean>

   <bean id="company" class="package.Company" />

</beans>

We could do it like this:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">

   <bean id="employee" class="package.Employee"
       p:direccion-ref="company"
       p:weeklyHours="35" />

   <bean id="company" class="package.Company" />

</beans>

A small change that could make our XMLs more compact, although I don't know if more readable.

More examples here.