The org.springframework.osgi.extensions.annotation bundle that ships with Spring Dynamic Modules provides early access to annotation-based support for injecting references to OSGi services. JDK 1.5 or above is required to use this feature.

Bean class (setter) methods may be annotated with org.springframework.osgi.extensions.annotation.ServiceReference. By default the property type of the annotated property is used to look up a service with a matching service interface in the OSGi service registry and inject the result. For example, given the configuration:

<bean id="annotationDriven" class="MyAnnotationDrivenBeanClass"/>
      

and the class declaration:

public class MyAnnotationDrivenBeanClass {

  @ServiceReference
  public void setMessageService(MessageService aService) { ... }

}

then a service lookup for services implementing the MessageService interface will be performed, and the best match (using the same algorithm as documented for the reference element) will be injected.

The ServiceReference annotation class has a number of attributes that can be used to control the service lookup (for example, to specify a filter string) that mirror the options provided by the reference element. See the javadoc for more information.