Why is Spring @Value not working to read my parameter and default value?

In my small Spring project, i have a value that i may need to change of on of my parameters.  The simple solution would be

@Value("${myParam:defaultVal")

private String myParam;

Yet it was not working and the value was coming out as "$myparam:defaultVal".

What's the issue?
Eventually i stumbled upon the issue via this spring issue. I also saw it addressed here although there is a mistake as it is not sufficient to use util:properties as explained here. So, to make this work if you are using XML just add this in:

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:/myfile.properties"/>

Now hopefully this wont happen again to me...

Using Gradle for a mixed groovy and java project and creating a distribution zip

Yes, I still use Groovy upon occasion. Groovy still is more readable and elegant in a lot of instances even than Java 8.

Ok but let's say i am writing both java and groovy in the project
In order to have this work, you need to configure your Gradle project with the following small changes so that you can make it compile the mixed code.

You need to make all the code compile as Groovy code (even the Java code).
So, add the following lines to your project:

sourceSets.main.java.srcDirs = []
sourceSets.main.groovy.srcDirs += ["src/main/java"]

This makes all your java code compile with the Groovy compiler to prevent dependency issues between the Groovy and Java code.

Now, your code all works but you want to put the zip of it somewhere to use. So, just add these lines:

task zip(dependsOn: jar, type: Zip) {
    from { configurations.runtime.allArtifacts.files } {
        into("${project.name}-${project.version}")
    }
    from { configurations.runtime } {
        into("${project.name}-${project.version}/lib")
    }

}

Now when you run gradle zip you will get a zip with all dependencies inside!