Using Spring Profiles and Java Configuration

My last blog introduced Spring 3.1’s profiles and explained both the business case for using them and demonstrated their use with Spring XML configuration files. It seems, however, that a good number of developers prefer using Spring’s Java based application configuration and so Spring have designed a way of using profiles with their existing @Configuration annotation.

Using Spring Profiles in XML Config

My last blog was very simple as it covered my painless upgrade from Spring 3.0.x to Spring 3.1.x and I finished by mentioning that you can upgrade your Spring schemas to 3.1 to allow you to take advantage of Spring’s newest features. In today’s blog, I'm going to cover one of the coolest of these features: Spring profiles. But, before talking about how you implement Spring profiles, I thought that it would be a good idea to explore the problem that they’re solving, which is need to create different Spring configurations for different environments. This usually arises because your app needs to connect to several similar external resources during its development lifecycle and more often and not these ‘external resources’ are usually databases, although they could be JMS queues, web services, remote EJBs etc.