Spring XML namespaces : How do I find what are the implementing classes behind them?

Question

In my Spring 3.1 application, I sometime need to change the default behavior of some of the Spring namespaces in my context files. To do that, I create custom classes that i

Answer 1

Every Spring namespace has an associated NamespaceHandler implementation. The namespace schemas are mapped to schema files inside Spring JARs in various spring.schemas files (see also Spring DI applicationContext.xml how exactly is xsi:schemaLocation used?).

The XML schema namespaces are also mapped to handler classes in spring.handlers files (several as each Spring JAR might introduce different namespaces). For your convenience here is a list of most common namespaces:

Spring core

• aop - AopNamespaceHandler
• c - SimpleConstructorNamespaceHandler
• cache - CacheNamespaceHandler
• context - ContextNamespaceHandler
• jdbc - JdbcNamespaceHandler
• jee - JeeNamespaceHandler
• jms - JmsNamespaceHandler
• lang - LangNamespaceHandler
• mvc - MvcNamespaceHandler
• oxm - OxmNamespaceHandler
• p - SimplePropertyNamespaceHandler
• task - TaskNamespaceHandler
• tx - TxNamespaceHandler
• util - UtilNamespaceHandler

Spring Security

• security - SecurityNamespaceHandler
• oauth - OAuthSecurityNamespaceHandler

Spring integration

• int - IntegrationNamespaceHandler
• amqp - AmqpNamespaceHandler
• event - EventNamespaceHandler
• feed - FeedNamespaceHandler
• file - FileNamespaceHandler
• ftp - FtpNamespaceHandler
• gemfire - GemfireIntegrationNamespaceHandler
• groovy - GroovyNamespaceHandler
• http - HttpNamespaceHandler
• ip - IpNamespaceHandler
• jdbc - JdbcNamespaceHandler
• jms - JmsNamespaceHandler
• jmx - JmxNamespaceHandler
• mail - MailNamespaceHandler
• redis - RedisNamespaceHandler
• rmi - RmiNamespaceHandler
• script - ScriptNamespaceHandler
• security - IntegrationSecurityNamespaceHandler
• sftp - SftpNamespaceHandler
• stream - StreamNamespaceHandler
• twitter - TwitterNamespaceHandler
• ws - WsNamespaceHandler
• xml - IntegrationXmlNamespaceHandler
• xmpp - XmppNamespaceHandler

If you browse to the source of each of these classes you will quickly discover various BeanDefinitionParser implementations responsible for parsing actual XML definitions.