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.