spring PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer and context:property-placeholder

<context:property-placeholder ... /> is the XML equivalent to the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer. So, prefer that. The <util:properties/> simply factories a java.util.Properties instance that you can inject.

In Spring 3.1 (not 3.0…) you can do something like this:

@Configuration
@PropertySource("/foo/bar/services.properties")
public class ServiceConfiguration { 

    @Autowired Environment environment; 

    @Bean public javax.sql.DataSource dataSource( ){ 
        String user = this.environment.getProperty("ds.user");
        ...
    } 
}

In Spring 3.0, you can “access” properties defined using the PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer mechanism using the SpEl annotations:

@Value("${ds.user}") private String user;

If you want to remove the XML all together, simply register the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer manually using Java configuration. I prefer the 3.1 approach. But, if youre using the Spring 3.0 approach (since 3.1’s not GA yet…), you can now define the above XML like this:

@Configuration 
public class MySpring3Configuration {     
        @Bean 
        public static PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer configurer() { 
             PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer ppc = ...
             ppc.setLocations(...);
             return ppc; 
        } 

        @Bean 
        public class DataSource dataSource(
                @Value("${ds.user}") String user, 
                @Value("${ds.pw}") String pw, 
                ...) { 
            DataSource ds = ...
            ds.setUser(user);
            ds.setPassword(pw);                        
            ...
            return ds;
        }
}

Note that the PPC is defined using a static bean definition method. This is required to make sure the bean is registered early, because the PPC is a BeanFactoryPostProcessor – it can influence the registration of the beans themselves in the context, so it necessarily has to be registered before everything else.