Services and reloadable bean definitions

[Marvin Addison]

> I don't think you can reload the application context while still
> processing requests through the original, can you? If we can, that might
> argue for being less aggressive with it.

Good question -- knew it would be asked and I didn't know the answer
offhand. I've done some reading and code review for the
DispatcherServlet case and it appears it's designed to continue
processing requests while the underlying application context is
refreshed. I simply don't see anything like an IO wait or monitor wait
that would block requests while the context internal state is updated.
I think some testing is in order to say for certain, but looks
promising.

I believe DispatcherServlet or a subclass is used implicitly by
Webflow since the entry point into a flow is a HandlerAdapter
component. It should be straightforward to mock up a test case for the
DispatcherServlet case generally; if that works as expected it should
be safe to assume similar behavior for flow-based webapps.

M