Summary

In this chapter, you have seen how Spring 2.5 handles the new XML context files. Like previous releases of the Spring Framework, Spring 2.5 is fully backward compatible, so all your existing Spring 1.x document- type-definition-based (DTD-based) configuration will still work. But even though you can still use Spring 1.x DTD context files, you will get much more flexibility from using the new schema- based context files. In fact, some Spring 2.5 features are quite verbose to configure using the standard DTD- based approach. Good examples of this are the configuration of AspectJ beans and dynamic languages (for more information about AspectJ and Spring, see Chapter 6; for dynamic languages, see Chapter 14).

As well as understanding the standard namespaces provided by Spring, you now know how to create your own custom namespace. This is particularly helpful if you are developing a component of an application that many developers of your organization are going to use. If you write a custom namespace for its configuration, you can ensure that the beans will not be misconfigured.