Spring 3 applicationContext-security-JDBC.xml has beans:bean not bean?

Question

can someone please tell me what in my ApplicationContext I have to use beans:bean and not bean and how to fix it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans:beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security"
    xmlns:beans="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:jdbc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc/spring-jdbc-3.0.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/security
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-3.0.xsd">

    <http auto-config="true" use-expressions="true">
        <intercept-url pattern="/friends/**" access="hasRole('ROLE_USER')" />

        <form-login login-page="/login.html"
        default-target-url="/index.html" always-use-default-target="true"
            authentication-failure-url="/login.html?authfailed=true" />

    </http>

    <authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager">
        <authentication-provider>
            <jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="dataSource" />
        </authentication-provider>
    </authentication-manager>

    <beans:bean id="propertyConfigurer"
        class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
        <beans:property name="location" value="classpath:jdbc.properties" />
    </beans:bean>


    <beans:bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
        <beans:property name="driverClassName" value="${database.driver}" />
        <beans:property name="url" value="${database.url}" />
        <beans:property name="username" value="${database.user}" />
        <beans:property name="password" value="${database.password}" />
        <beans:property name="initialSize" value="5" />
        <beans:property name="maxActive" value="10" />
    </beans:bean>




</beans:beans>

Answer 1

Explanation. Basically you are dealing with XML namespaces here. Spring configuration allows you to use configuration elements from different namespaces as a way to extend the basic beans namespace configuration with convenient domain-specific configuration, like security configuration in the case above.

In cases where your configuration file concentrates on one of these extension namespaces--again, let's use security as an example--it can clean up the file if you declare the default namespace to be the extension namespace instead of the standard beans namespace. That's what

xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security"

does--it makes security the default namespace, which means you don't have to prefix it with sec: or security:.

But when you make security the default, then you have to be explicit when using beans namespace elements. Hence the beans: prefix.

Solution. If you prefer beans to be the default, just change the default namespace to beans:

xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"

Alternative solution. Alternatively, if you want to type something shorter, you could do

xmlns:b="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"

instead of

xmlns:beans="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"

which would allow you to do things like

<b:bean id="beanId" class="x.y.z.BeanClass" />