How to use Spring services in JSF-managed beans?

Question

JSF is very popular technology in Java world, however, cooperation with Spring is still painfull and requires \'nasty\' hacks. I have currently the problem with one of this

Answer 1

I experienced a lot of issues with org.springframework.web.jsf.el.SpringBeanFacesELResolver, too. Mostly related to unmatching object scopes (Spring has no equivalent to JSF's view scope and conversation scope). Some people also complain about serialization problems.

I successfully applied the solution proposed in this article: http://www.beyondjava.net/blog/integrate-jsf-2-spring-3-nicely/.

In my case, serialization, was not a problem and I was only concerned with bean scopes. I wished JSF to fully manage the backing beans lifecycle without interference with Spring beans lifecycle.

I made JSF managed beans to load the Spring context and autowire themselves to access Spring-managed beans from the JSF context.

I developed the following JSF bean superclass:

public abstract class AutowireableManagedBean {

    protected AutowireCapableBeanFactory ctx;

    @PostConstruct
    protected void init() {
        logger.debug("init");
        ctx = WebApplicationContextUtils
                .getWebApplicationContext(
                        (ServletContext) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()
                                .getExternalContext().getContext())
                .getAutowireCapableBeanFactory();
        // The following line does the magic
        ctx.autowireBean(this);
    }
   ...
}

Then, my concrete JSF backing beans looked like this (I was able to use view scope without problems):

@ManagedBean
@ViewScoped
public class MyBackingBean extends AutowireableManagedBean {

    @Autowired
    private MyDao myDao;