Spring MVC on Google App Engine

I've been developing an application on Google App Engine and reached a point where I really wanted to be able to use Spring and Spring MVC on the server side.

To my surprise, I discovered that it was relatively easy to get Spring running on Google App Engine (at least for the basic functionality that I'm using it for). However, I did come across the javax.naming.InitialContextFactory issue.

The root cause of this particular issue is that, under certain circumstances, Spring will attempt to load a bean that depends on javax.naming.InitialContextFactory. The problem is that this class is not on GAE's JRE whitelist, and, therefore, results in a ClassNotFoundException.

For example, this occurs when you're using annotation based configuration and have a line similar to the following in your config:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.bizo.accounting.ui.server" />

I searched the forums to see if anyone else had found a solution. This post discusses a potential solution.

I ended up trying the suggested solution and found that it worked. The solution involves loading a 'dummy' bean with the same id as the bean that depends on javax.naming.InitialContextFactory (prior to the context:component-scan). This tricks the container into thinking that the bean has already been loaded.

For example, I put the following line at the top of my config:

<bean id="org.springframework.context.annotation.internalPersistenceAnnotationProcessor" class="java.lang.String"></bean>

I have no doubt that I'll run into other issues with GAE, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that basic Spring integration works without too much difficulty.