Spring Framework 4.0 has native support for a beans{} “DSL” (borrowed from Grails), and you can embed bean definitions in your Groovy application scripts using the same format. This is sometimes a good way to include external features like middleware declarations. For example:

@Configuration
class Application implements CommandLineRunner {

    @Autowired
    SharedService service

    @Override
    void run(String... args) {
        println service.message
    }

}

import my.company.SharedService

beans {
    service(SharedService) {
        message "Hello World"
    }
}

You can mix class declarations with beans{} in the same file as long as they stay at the top level, or you can put the beans DSL in a separate file if you prefer.