Java – Spring @Autowired usage

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What are the pros and cons of using @Autowired in a class that will be wired up by Spring?

Just to clarify, I'm talking specifically about the @Autowired annotation, not auto-wiring in XML.

I probably just don't understand it, but to me it almost seems like an anti-pattern – your classes start to become aware that they are tied to a DI framework, rather than just being POJOs. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I like having the external XML config for beans, and I like to have explicit wirings, so I know exactly what is wired where.

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For a long time I believed that there was a value in having a "centralized, declarative, configuration" like the xml files we all used to use. Then I realized that most of the stuff in the files wasn't configuration - it was never changed anywhere after development, ever. Then I realized that "centralized" only has value in quite small systems - only in small systems will you ever be able to grok a configuration file as a whole. And what is really the value of understanding the wiring as a whole, when the same "wirings" are mostly duplicated by dependencies in the code? So the only thing I've kept is meta-data (annotations), which is still kind-of declarative. These never change at runtime and they're never "configuration" data that someone will change on the fly - so I think keeping it in the code is nice.

I use full auto-wiring as much as I can. I love it. I won't go back to old-style spring unless threatened at gun-point. My reasons for preferring fully @Autowired have changed over time.

Right now I think the most important reason for using autowiring is that there's one less abstraction in your system to keep track of. The "bean name" is effectively gone. It turns out the bean name only exists because of xml. So a full layer of abstract indirections (where you would wire bean-name "foo" into bean "bar") is gone. Now I wire the "Foo" interface into my bean directly, and implementation is chosen by run-time profile. This allows me to work with code when tracing dependencies and implementations. When I see an autowired dependency in my code I can just press the "go to implementation" key in my IDE and up comes the list of known implementations. In most cases there's just one implementation and I'm straight into the class. Can't be much simpler than that, and I always know exactly what implementation is being used (I claim that the opposite is closer to the truth with xml wiring - funny how your perspective changes!)

Now you could say that it's just a very simple layer, but each layer of abstraction that we add to our systems increase complexity. I really don't think the xml ever added any real value to any system I've worked with.

Most systems I've ever work with only have one configuration of the production runtime environment. There may be other configurations for test and so on.

I'd say that full autowiring is the ruby-on-rails of spring: It embraces the notion that there's a normal and common usage pattern that most use cases follow. With XML configuration you permit a lot of consistent/inconsistent configuration usage that may/may not be intended. I've seen so much xml configuration go overboard with inconsistencies - does it get refactored together with the code ? Thought not. Are those variations there for a reason? Usually not.

We hardly use qualifiers in our configuration, and found other ways to solve these situations. This is a clear "disadvantage" we encounter: We've slightly changed the way we code to make it interact smoother with autowiring: A customer repository no longer implements the generic Repository<Customer> interface but we make an interface CustomerRepository that extends Repository<Customer>. Sometimes there's also a trick or two when it comes to subclassing. But it usually just points us in the direction of stronger typing, which I find is almost always a better solution.

But yes, you're tying to a particular style of DI that mostly spring does. We don't even make public setters for dependencies any more (So you could argue that we're +1 in the encapsulation/information hiding department) We still have some xml in our system, but the xml basically only contains the anomalies. Full autowiring integrates nicely with xml.

The only thing we need now is for the @Component, @Autowired and the rest to be included in a JSR (like JSR-250), so we don't have to tie in with spring. This is the way things have been happening in the past (the java.util.concurrent stuff springs to mind), so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this happened again.

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Java – How does autowiring work in Spring

First, and most important - all Spring beans are managed - they "live" inside a container, called "application context".

Second, each application has an entry point to that context. Web applications have a Servlet, JSF uses a el-resolver, etc. Also, there is a place where the application context is bootstrapped and all beans - autowired. In web applications this can be a startup listener.

Autowiring happens by placing an instance of one bean into the desired field in an instance of another bean. Both classes should be beans, i.e. they should be defined to live in the application context.

What is "living" in the application context? This means that the context instantiates the objects, not you. I.e. - you never make new UserServiceImpl() - the container finds each injection point and sets an instance there.

In your controllers, you just have the following:

@Controller // Defines that this class is a spring bean
@RequestMapping("/users")
public class SomeController {

    // Tells the application context to inject an instance of UserService here
    @Autowired
    private UserService userService;

    @RequestMapping("/login")
    public void login(@RequestParam("username") String username,
           @RequestParam("password") String password) {

        // The UserServiceImpl is already injected and you can use it
        userService.login(username, password);

    }
}

A few notes:

In your applicationContext.xml you should enable the <context:component-scan> so that classes are scanned for the @Controller, @Service, etc. annotations.
The entry point for a Spring-MVC application is the DispatcherServlet, but it is hidden from you, and hence the direct interaction and bootstrapping of the application context happens behind the scene.
UserServiceImpl should also be defined as bean - either using <bean id=".." class=".."> or using the @Service annotation. Since it will be the only implementor of UserService, it will be injected.
Apart from the @Autowired annotation, Spring can use XML-configurable autowiring. In that case all fields that have a name or type that matches with an existing bean automatically get a bean injected. In fact, that was the initial idea of autowiring - to have fields injected with dependencies without any configuration. Other annotations like @Inject, @Resource can also be used.

Java – @Resource vs @Autowired

Both @Autowired (or @Inject) and @Resource work equally well. But there is a conceptual difference or a difference in the meaning

@Resource means get me a known resource by name. The name is extracted from the name of the annotated setter or field, or it is taken from the name-Parameter.
@Inject or @Autowired try to wire in a suitable other component by type.

So, basically these are two quite distinct concepts. Unfortunately the Spring-Implementation of @Resource has a built-in fallback, which kicks in when resolution by-name fails. In this case, it falls back to the @Autowired-kind resolution by-type. While this fallback is convenient, IMHO it causes a lot of confusion, because people are unaware of the conceptual difference and tend to use @Resource for type-based autowiring.

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Related Solutions

Java – How does autowiring work in Spring

Java – @Resource vs @Autowired

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