Mike's been talking about introducing OGNL support. Seems like a nice idea to me, though not really feasible for the 1.0 release I think. But hey, let's put it in here so we won't forget... Mike's mail (December 2nd): ============================ Or an even better idea... how about supporting OGNL within the Spring config files? (like Xwork does) This would be awesome and I just found a second use case for it (the very minute Rob's email came in). My use case - Maps. The Map syntax is nice, but not very useful in practicality I'm finding as the key and value of the map are usually related, for instance I often want to put a list of referenced beans into a map, with ref.getName() (or some method) called for the key. At the moment I have to add a setBeans(List) method to my class, and then in that setter iterate and add to a map - smelly! If we allowed OGNL expressions, it would be very simple to do this in the config file itself: <property value="myMapProp"> <map> <entry> <key>$referencedBean.name</key> <value><ref bean="referencedBean" /></value> </entry> ... More entries </map> </property> I'm sure there are a million other places where OGNL would be useful too, but AFAIK the above can't be done without it? Or have I just been at this desk far too long? M