Lately, I had been thinking about bringing some functionalitites of Spring 3 into the Warp Spring MVC extension.

Current the extension is being compiled against Spring 2.5.6. In order not to brake the it's compatiblity with older Spring versions I have been thinking about creating new seperate artifact that could target new Spring versions or doing a little hack in the implemntationm so that it could detect which Spring version has been registered in classpath and package appropiate classes.

Either way I was thinking about introducing fallowing changes.

• Idea 1. Programmatically configuring the ApplicationContext in WarpDispatcherServlet, so that it could be used with together with WebApplicationInitializer in no descriptor deployments scenarios. i.e.

                  Note: Current version always loads the [name]-servlet.xml from WEB-INF directory.

{code}
public class EmployeeWebInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {
 
    public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
 
        // creates the web app context
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext webContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
        webContext.register(WebAppConfig.class);
 
        // registers a warp dispatcher servlet
        ServletRegistration.Dynamic servletConfig = servletContext.addServlet("warp-servlet",  new WarpDispatcherServlet(webContext));
        servletConfig.setLoadOnStartup(1);
        servletConfig.addMapping("*.htm");
    }
}
 
{code}

• Idea 2. The issue could also approached a little bit differently. We could introduce a implementation of HandlerInterceptor that could be registered within Spring context directly. This way we would have solution that works with any Spring version and also brings alternative way for capturing the execution context. Although the interceptor has it's limitations, it's being registered within the execution chain and there is no guarantee that the interceptor will be always invoked.

The intercetor would be configured in the xml file.

{code}
<beans>
    <mvc:annotation-driven/>
 
    <mvc:interceptors>
        <bean class="org.jboss.arquillian.warp.extension.spring.interceptor.WarpHandlerInterceptor"/>
    </mvc:interceptors>
</beans>
{code}

• Idea 2. A) As an extension to this idea we could include nice little shortcut in a form of schema based configuration:

{code}
<beans>
    <mvc:annotation-driven/>
 
    <warp:enable-interception />
</beans>
{code}

• Idea 2. B) Or in caase we would also target Spring 3 and it's java based configuration, additional handy annotation could be introduced.

{code}
@EnableWarp
@EnableWebMvc
@Configuration
public class ContextConfiguration {
  ...
}
{code}

All of that would enalbe to resgister the Warp extension, without modyfing the web.xml settings, and running the tests in plain Spring DispatcherServlet.

Potentialy in Spring 3.1 one could use profiles to prepare test configuration in which Warp will be enabled.