dykstrom/spring-and-bsaf

Spring and BSAF working together

spring-and-bsaf

This small application demonstrates how to make the Spring Framework and the Better Swing Application Framework (BSAF) work together. We leave the question of why you would like to do that to another time. ;-)

The problem with combining the two frameworks is that they both want to create the singleton instance of the main application class. BSAF requires you to create and run your Application subclass by calling the static launch method. Spring of course wants to create all managed beans as part of the application context.

The solution is to introduce a @Configuration class with a method that creates a Spring bean from the BSAF application instance. In the Application subclass, you let BSAF create the application:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    // Create the singleton application instance using BSAF here
    launch(BsafApplication.class, args);
}

In the @Configuration class, you create a bean that just returns the singleton instance:

@Bean
public BsafApplication application() {
    // Return the singleton application instance as a Spring bean here
    return (BsafApplication) Application.getInstance();
}

This enables the application instance to be injected into other classes, even though it was created before the application context was loaded. You just have to be careful to not access the application bean before the application instance has been created by calling launch. Otherwise, BSAF will create a dummy instance that is not compatible with your real Application subclass.

For a Kotlin version of this project, please see spring-and-bsaf-kotlin.