Annotation-based support for ApplicationListeners

[kay]

Hi everyone,

I created an implementation of the ApplicationListener interface which is capable to dispatch event notifications based on annotated methods. The advantage over implementing ApplicationListener directly is similar to that of using @Controller-style MVC - you can use POJOs and you can have multiple methods with type-safe arguments rather than doing "instanceof" on a ApplicationEvent and then downcasting.

The current implementation is not very optimized for speed - it scans all the methods of the target every time there is an event; this could be cached. I'm sure the forum members could think of other improvements as well. Does anybody like this enough for me to submit it as a new feature request?

Sample code:

public class EventListener {
    @EventHandler
    public void onAppEvent(MyCustomEvent event) {
        // ...
    }
}

Configuration:

    <bean id="eventListener" class="EventListener"/>
    <bean class="org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotatedApplicationListener" p:target-ref="eventListener"/>

A Maven project that includes an integration test can be checked out with Git:

git clone http://pavel.tcholakov.net/code/eventhandler-annotation.git/

Or just grab the zip from http://pavel.tcholakov.net/code/even...n-20090408.zip

Regards,
Pavel