Spring Annotations: Using Constructor Arugments with @Autowired

Introduction

I've struggled for weeks with wanting to use a constructor with arguments along with Spring Annotations (in particular @Autowired) but most blog posts and tutorials say that this isn't possible or needs to use Spring Expressions.

Hypothesis

There has got to be some way to do this.  The alternative I have been using was to have an empty object autowired in and then manually run a bunch of setters to inject the required configuration.  This ends up being error prone and verbose to verify (e.g. every public method has to check that the required fields are not null).

Results

After searching the web for a long time I finally found that you CAN use multi-argument constructors if you refrain from using the @Component or @Service annotations and instead create the classes in a @Configuration class with @Bean annotations.  After creating a class (manually, with new) you can autowire it by using AutowireCapableBeanFactory.autowireBean(Object) method.

Conclusion

My code is a lot more readable and simple now, and let me find a few subtle bugs that did not turn up in the unit tests.  I ended up with complex object creation logic, but it is out in the @Configuration classes instead of inside of the core objects.  I am much happier with this situation.

SpEL in JSF

I've been having an awful time getting SpEL to register in my JSF .xhtml pages.  I just want to do a simple

...

However, my project would give me an error saying that '(' was unexpected. This was despite the Spring Documentation saying that SpEL is the default expression language.

I made some head way when I put the following into my spring configuration xml:

This should work with JSF 2.0, but my project uses JSF 1.2 so I got a cast exception since JSF 1.2 uses the org.springframework.binding package instead.
The following should work with JSF 1.2 (I'll test this soon).

If you're using Spring Web Flow (SWF) then you'll need a different expression parser; use org.springframework.faces.webflow.FacesSpringELExpressionParser with the same constructor-args.
Note how it wraps the new SpelExpressionParser.

I've done thorough Google searches on this topic and found nothing, so as far as I can tell this is unique information!