public class MyApplicationContextAwareClass
{

  @Autowired(required = true)
  private ApplicationContext applicationContext;

  // ...
}

At work we mainly use Java as general purpose language, but we also pay attention to groovy. There are other scripting languages which are more mature and with a much better syntax, but for our purpose - scripting some Java applications and frameworks - it’s best suited. (You may read a nice article from Fowler about that.)

In one case we use IBatis in the persistence layer and startet to write services which use our SqlMapDaos in Groovy. So I thought about an generic DAO for SQL-Maps using groovy. I had implemented a DAO using Spring Aspects before, like in this article about a generic Hibernate DAO. But this requires at least to define an interface for the DAO. But because Groovy it uses dynamic typing, we can even drop that also.