spring applicationConfig beans node

In the spring configuration file applicationConfig.xml, the root node is beans.

But it doesn't contain only beans. In fact, security configuration requires an http element.

开发者_运维问答My question is: while http is not (seems to me not to be) a bean, is it "bean like" in the sense that it determines the creation of a service, or refers to a running service (say the http listener for the application)?

PS. In "Spring Security Reference documentation" 3.1.0-DRAFT at 2.1.1:

"Web/HTTP Security (...) Sets up the filters and related service beans used to apply the framework authentication mechanisms ..."

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Yes, everything in a Spring config is just setting up beans. You could--and in fact used to be forced to--set up all the beans yourself, but along about Spring 2.0, the framework added a nifty feature that they called "Extensible XML Authoring", which gives other people/projects a way to define their own, custom XML syntax that gets translated into Spring beans at startup via a NamespaceHandler.