Services and reloadable bean definitions

[Marvin Addison]

> - There are some subsystems/bean hierarchies that we want to refresh
> independent of the container’s lifetime.

I wonder if you could explain a little further about the need for that
feature. I can imagine it would be valuable, but it presumably comes
at substantial cost:

- Spring provides nothing like this out of the box.
- It may be difficult to develop due to the need to provide
consistency to dependent components.
- The v2 implementation has some limitations or features that may be
hard to adapt to v3.

I think it's fair to assume that Spring doesn't support reloading
parts of an application context primarily because of the difficulty of
managing behavior on dependent components. I would imagine the
thinking is that it's safer and simpler to reload the entire
application context.

Just thinking out loud: I wonder whether it's possible to segment
subsystems into separate application contexts that interact via
message passing or similar; then you could get segmented reloading
with well supported Spring capabilities.

M