A simplified Spring XML config namespace is provided for configuring the MessageBroker in your WebApplicationContext. To use the namespace support you must add the schema location in your Spring XML config files. A typical config will look something like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	   xmlns:flex="http://www.springframework.org/schema/flex"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/flex 
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/flex/spring-flex-1.0.xsd">
...
</beans>
    		
    	

This makes the Spring BlazeDS Integration configuration tags available under the flex namespace in your configuration files. The above setup will be assumed for the rest of the configuration examples to follow. For the full detail of every attribute and tag available in the config namespace, be sure to refer to the spring-flex-1.0.xsd as every element and attribute is fully documented there. Using an XSD-aware XML editor such as the one in Eclipse should bring up the documentation automatically as you type.

At a minimum, the MessageBrokerFactoryBean must be configured as a bean in your Spring WebApplicationContext in order to bootstrap the MessageBroker, along with a MessageBrokerHandlerAdapter and an appropriate HandlerMapping (usually a SimpleUrlHandlerMapping) to route incoming requests to the Spring-managed MessageBroker.

These beans will be registered automatically by using the provided message-broker tag in your bean definition file. For example, in its simplest form:

<flex:message-broker/>    	
    	

This will set up the MessageBroker and necessary supporting infrastructure using sensible defaults. The defaults can be overriden using the provided attributes of the message-broker tag and its associated child elements. For example, the default location of the BlazeDS XML configuration file (/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml) can be overridden using the services-config-path attribute. The MessageBrokerFactoryBean uses Spring's ResourceLoader abstraction, so that typical Spring resource paths may be used. For example, to load the configuration from the application's classpath:

<flex:message-broker services-config-path="classpath*:services-config.xml"    	
    	

The equivalent MessageBrokerFactoryBean definition using vanilla Spring configuration would be:

<!-- Bootstraps and exposes the BlazeDS MessageBroker -->
<bean id="_messageBroker" class="org.springframework.flex.core.MessageBrokerFactoryBean" >
	<property name="servicesConfigPath" value="classpath*:services-config.xml" />
</bean>    	
    	

Note especially that with the message-broker tag, it is not necessary to assign a custom id to the MessageBroker, and it is in fact discouraged so that you won't have to continually reference it later. The only reason you would ever need to provide a custom id is if you were bootstrapping more than one MessageBroker in the same WebApplicationContext.