The other day I was working on an application that needed to be enabled for multiple deployment strategies. The default deployment is based on Weblogic. The alternative, new strategy leverages - amongst others - Grizzly. The application architecture initially had some elements that specifically used services which were provided for by Weblogic/Java EE. The alternative however does not have these services. Because we wanted to still have a single code base, we needed a way to activate specific Spring components based on the actual deployment. For this purpose we investigated the use of Spring Profiles.
This project provides some insight of how this actually works in practice. Basically we declare 2 profiles (besides the already present default profile, provided for by Spring). We then use these profiles to individuallindividually tag specific Spring configuration assets. Then depending on which profile(s) is (are) activated - particular components are put into play.
The AbstractProfileTest, would be a good point to start checking the code.