Spring MVC, JstlView and exposeContextBeansAsAttributes
Did you know that Spring MVC's JstlView has a exposeContextBeansAsAttributes property you can use to expose all your Spring beans to JSTL? I didn't. To configure it, you configure your viewResolver as follows:
<bean id="viewResolver"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
<property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"/>
<property name="exposeContextBeansAsAttributes" value="true"/>
<property name="prefix" value="/"/>
<property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
</bean>
After doing this, any Spring bean can get referenced in JSTL with:
${beanId.getterMethodWithoutTheGetPrefix}
If you're using Spring 2.5a annotations and <context:component-scan>, you'll need to specify a "value" attribute on your annotations in order to reference them in JSTL. For example:
@Controller(value = "beanId")
@RequestMapping("/foo.html")
public class MyController extends SimpleFormController
...
@Component(value="testClass")
public class TestClass {
Pretty cool stuff. It'd be a lot more useful if you could call methods with parameters. Hopefully JUEL will solve that problem. JSTL's functions work, but I'd rather write ${foo.method('arg')} rather than ${taglib:callMethod(foo, 'method', 'arg')}.