Primarily, you will use the IoC Registry as part of a Tapestry application. In those situations, the TapestryFilter will be responsible for starting and stopping the registry.

However, you may want to do some integration testing using the Registry from within a test case, or you may even use Tapestry IoC separately from Tapestry.

Building the Registry

The class RegistryBuilder is used to create a Registry.

RegistryBuilder builder = new RegistryBuilder();

builder.add(AppModule.class, UtilModule.class);

Registry registry = builder.build();

registry.performRegistryStartup();

You may invoke add() as many times as you wish, or pass as many module classes as you wish.

Using this approach, you will form a Registry containing the built-in services from the Tapestry IoC module, plus the modules you explicitly list.

The call to performRegistryStartup() is necessary to ensure that any services marked with the EagerLoad annotation are, in fact, loaded.

As of version 5.2 the class RegistryBuilder has convenience methods to build and start a Registry. The static method RegistryBuilder.buildAndStartupRegistry(Class...) constructs a registry, adds a number of modules to the registry and performs registry startup. The returned registry is ready to use.

Registry registry = RegistryBuilder.buildAndStartupRegistry(AppModule.class, UtilModule.class);

Building the Default Registry

The default registry is available by invoking the static method IOCUtilities.buildDefaultRegistry(). This method builds a Registry using autoloading logic, where modules to load are identified via a JAR Manifest entry.

In addition, the JVM system property tapestry.modules (if specified) is a list of additional module classes to load. This is often used in development, where tests may be executed against the local classes, not JARs, and so there is no manifest to read.

Shutting down the Registry

The method Registry.shutdown() will shutdown the Registry. This immediately invalidates all service proxies. Some services may have chosen to register for shutdown notification (for example, to do cleanup work such as closing a database connection).

Once the Registry is shutdown, it may not be used again: it will not be possible to access services within the Registry, or invoke methods on services previously acquired. All you can do is release the Registry to the garbage collector.