First off, a little disclaimer: I've been tasked with bugfixing/improving a system that's been developed over the last 10 years or so, using a (dis-)array of different technologies and by different developers, not all of which have done what you'd call a smashing job. In addition, we're missing the source for parts of the system. Therefore, I have to find ways of improving the state of things that can co-exist alongside the current implementation. So, I know that I'm asking things that may make you cringe, but with the state of things, there are really no other options.

What I need to do is expose properties read from property-files to the view. The view mainly consists of good, ol' JSPs (ie, there's no Spring MVC or servlets feeding the data). The culprit is that these property-files have placeholders, and I cannot for the life of me make Spring resolve the placeholders when using the properties in the view.

Personally, I'd've thought this would work:
Code:
    <context:property-placeholder properties-ref="appProperties"/>
    <util:properties id="appProperties" location="classpath:server.properties" />
And, then, in the JSPs, go:
Code:
    ApplicationContext context = (ApplicationContext) application.getAttribute("org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT");
    Properties springUtilProps = context.getBean("appProperties", Properties.class);
But, as stated, none of the placeholders get resolved, leaving me with "Property value: ${testProp}" instead of "Property value: Property resolved".

Is there any way of achieving what I want?