I'm new to Spring and I'm confused about something basic. Are the classes that are stereotyped (Service, Controller, Repository) treated as beans? I'm confused as to when you actually need to annotate/configure something as a bean and when you don't. Is it for the classes that aren't stereotyped?
Thanks!
From spring documentation:
In Spring, the objects that form the backbone of your application and
that are managed by the Spring IoC container are called beans. A bean
is an object that is instantiated, assembled, and otherwise managed by
a Spring IoC container. Otherwise, a bean is simply one of many
objects in your application. Beans, and the dependencies among them,
are reflected in the configuration metadata used by a container.
Service, Controller, Repository are managed by the Spring IoC container, so they are called beans. You annotate a class as #Serivice, #Controller, #Repository, or more in general #Component when you want spring to manage it: spring will manage the instance of annotated class in regard of the scope you select (not all these scope are always available):
singleton – Return a single bean instance per Spring IoC container
prototype – Return a new bean instance each time when requested
request – Return a single bean instance per HTTP request
session – Return a single bean instance per HTTP session
globalSession – Return a single bean instance per global HTTP
session
Related
I have read that whenever we do getBean() in spring, it returns desired object.
So does it mean, if i write call getBean() 1000 times, thousand object will be created ??
If yes, Than how Spring manages these objects ?
if No, Please explain how Spring works with respect to object creation ?
Is there something Object pool kind of concept ?
Please clarify my doubts. I am new to spring and is very confused whether spring framework is created to make our task easy or to make things more complicated.
Spring seems to be a web of XMLs :(
From the Spring Framework documentation on singleton bean factory scope:
The singleton scope
Only one shared instance of a singleton bean is managed, and all
requests for beans with an id or ids matching that bean definition
result in that one specific bean instance being returned by the Spring
container.
To put it another way, when you define a bean definition and it is
scoped as a singleton, the Spring IoC container creates exactly one
instance of the object defined by that bean definition. This single
instance is stored in a cache of such singleton beans, and all
subsequent requests and references for that named bean return the
cached object.
To sum it up, no, Spring will create only a single instance of each bean in a bean factory unless you change the default scope of singleton to some other bean scope.
Other bean scopes include:
Bean scopes
singleton (Default) Scopes a single bean definition to a
single object instance per Spring IoC
container.
prototype Scopes a single bean
definition to any number of object instances.
request Scopes a single bean definition to the
lifecycle of a single HTTP request; that is, each HTTP request has its
own instance of a bean created off the back of a single bean
definition. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring
ApplicationContext.
session Scopes a single
bean definition to the lifecycle of an HTTP Session. Only valid in the
context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.
global session Scopes a single bean definition to the
lifecycle of a global HTTP Session. Typically only valid when used in a portlet
context. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring
ApplicationContext.
I'm new to Spring and a little confused about how it works. I get that I can use the application context to instantiate beans and have them populated. However, is the idea that I should be able to just write Bean b = new Bean() and then have Spring to somehow automagically populate that Bean?
I'm experimenting with Spring in a web application, and as far as I can see I need to inject the ApplicationContext into, say, the servlets to be able to instantiate other beans (services, daos etc.) from there. It's a bit cumbersome, but probably works.
However, is Spring meant to be able to hook into any object instantiation which happens on classes defined as beans in applicationContext.xml?
Spring is an Inversion of Control container. A bean is an object whose life cycle is managed by Spring. If you want Spring to populate an object, it needs to go through Spring, ie. it needs to be bean.
is Spring meant to be able to hook into any object instantiation
which happens on classes defined as beans in applicationContext.xml?
Spring doesn't hook into anything. You configure your beans and the relationships between them with Spring and Spring handles creating the instances and linking them up.
For domain objects, Spring provides a solution via the #Configurable annotation: http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.0.RELEASE/spring-framework-reference/htmlsingle/#aop-atconfigurable
It requires compile- or load-time-weaving and, thus, introduces some additional complexity but having the convenience of using the standard new Bean() syntax plus Spring's autowiring is worth it in my opinion.
Alternatively, you could define your domain objects as beans with prototype scope and use some factory to create them using the Spring ApplicationContext.getBean() method. With a scope of prototype a new instance will be returned every time and since you go through the ApplicationContext, Spring will do all the dependency injection magic as usual.
As for services and other beans with singleton scope, you would typically NOT retrieve them by first injecting the ApplicationContext and using it but instead you would inject them via either a constructor, setter or annotation-based strategy. The documentation covers that in detail: http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.0.RELEASE/spring-framework-reference/htmlsingle/#beans-factory-collaborators
I'm having 1 #Controller bean in my project
and 2 #Service beans that this controller calls.
the services using 2 different #Repository beans for persisting.
My question is :
my server is about to get hundreds of calls simultaniously, isnt it "awkward" that all my beans i described above are of scope="singleton"? should i use "prototype" instead? or maybe spring does it automatically ?
I think in both cases you wil have the same number of objects.
The non-singleton, prototype scope of bean deployment results in the
creation of a new bean instance every time a request for that specific
bean is made (that is, it is injected into another bean or it is
requested via a programmatic getBean() method call on the
container). As a rule of thumb, you should use the prototype scope
for all beans that are stateful, while the singleton scope should be
used for stateless beans.
in Spring by default all beans it is "singleton" and should be in most cases.
Could someone give an overview or a summary of what the purpose of beans in a Spring framework context?
I understand the standard Java bean (no arg constructor, getters/setters, often serialized), but the Spring bean purpose seems to be different.
Is it a way of implementing the Singleton design pattern (one instance, for like factory classes) in a simple, reusable fashion?
I've mainly used Spring with annotations, but I feel I need to grasp this in order to understand Spring.
Thanks!
Beans are objects that form the backbone of the application.
A bean is simply an object that is instantiated, assembled and otherwise managed by a Spring IoC container; other than that, there is nothing special about a bean.It is in all other respects one of probably many objects in your application.
Spring beans are defined in a spring configuration file or by using annotations, instantiated by the Spring container, and then injected into your application.
Spring beans will not be singleton design pattern until you explicitly make them to be.The singleton design pattern and the spring scope 'singleton' are different things.You can define different bean scopes depending on your requirements.
The scopes could be :
singleton – Return a single bean instance per Spring IoC container
prototype – Return a new bean instance each time when requested
request – Return a single bean instance per HTTP request.
session – Return a single bean instance per HTTP session.
globalSession – Return a single bean instance per global HTTP
session.
The default scope is singleton.
I understand the standard Java bean (no arg constructor,
getters/setters, often serialized), but the Spring bean purpose seems
to be different.
You mean always serialized. Why do you think the purpose seems different?
In the end, you write classes. A lot of time these are POJOs, Plain Old Java Objects. Sometimes you implement an interface or extend a class, but its all just classes.
Beans are just classes. Don't overcomplicate it.
Now Spring might take your beans (classes) and manage them for you via any of a number of policies (prototype, singleton) but that doesn't change what a bean is, it speaks to how Spring manages the bean.
To understand best, you should get familiar with dependency injection. In a few words dependency injection allows you to use objects, or services without explicitly creating them (of course, it gives other benefits, but let's focus on the question). This is achieved by maintaining a dependency container that is - roughly said - a collection of beans.
A bean is a service/component you use in your application. Unlike the EJB, with Spring the bean is not constrained to constructor arguments or specific annotations (especially if you use xml contexts). You register a bean with a container (by defining a context), and when you require it, the container will provide you with an instance of that bean. In order to create the bean, the container examines its class and constructors, and uses any other registered beans within that context, to call the appropriate constructor or property setter.
You can configure a bean to be a singleton - this is not a singleton as in the design pattern term. Singleton beans are created once within the container, and the same instance is used whenever the bean is requested from that container. You can also use the prototype scope to force the container to create a new instance each time.
I am trying to better understand Spring instantiation of beans. To illustrate my doubts, let's assume we have a Service class being wired in a Controller, here are the questions:
How will Spring manage the lifecycle
of the Controller? Will a new object
be created per request?
Once a Service is instantiaded and
wired to a Controller, will Spring
re-use that object reference to wire
it in to other beans?
Like Servlets, Controllers' lifecycle spans beyond requests. All of controllers in the application are instantiated only once when application is started; afterwards those objects are re-used to service all requests.
As Bozho pointed out, by default all beans are in singleton scope, therefore they will be re-used everywhere, unless specified otherwise.
The default scope is singleton, which means beans will be re-used (i.e. 1) no, a new object will not be created per request, and 2) yes, the object reference will be reused).
This can all be configured. Have a look at http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/beans.html#beans-factory-scopes.
It all depends on the bean scope. By default all beans are in singleton scope - that is, they are instantiated by the container only once.
If you specify #Scope("request") (or the xml equivalent) then the same service object (singleton) will be injected in all instances of the request-scoped controller. (But you rarely need request-scoped controllers)