title: Reading from a properties file Spring 3
body: <p>I've tried looking for an example of using the @Value annotation in Spring 3 to read values from a properties file using Spring EL but I haven't found a good example. </p>
  
  <p>Here are some of the constituent pieces I've seen to achieve this except I don't know how all of these work together to read from a properties file</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;util:properties id="ewConfiguration" location="classpath:ew.properties"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, how do I use this in my class to retrieve values from the ew.properties file to bind them to instance variables ?</p>
  
  <p>For instance, if there exists a property 
  url=www.google.com</p>
  
  <p>and I have </p>
  
  <pre><code>@Configuration 
  class AppConfig {
  
   @Value("???")
   private String url //what do I use in the place of the ??? to bind the value of the url property 
                      // in the properties file to this instance variable ?
  }
  </code></pre>