#Bean annotation context config cashing data - spring

I'm following this tutorial:
http://www.zenjava.com/2011/10/24/multiple-controllers-with-shared-resources/
And my question is (regarding Spring annotation context configuration):
why #Bean annotation is cashing data between all Person instances? And how to avoid that if needed?
Sorry for trivial question but I'm new to Spring

What is actually happening, is that all beans defined in Spring are Singleton by default (not in a Design Pattern sense, but in a container managed sense, meaning that Spring will reuse the same Person instance whenever it needs a dependency of class Person.class).
If you need to have different instance of Person injected into each dependency, you need to specify #Bean(scope=DefaultScopes.PROTOTYPE)

Related

Spring injects dependencies in constructor without #Autowired annotation

I'm experimenting with examples from this official Spring tutorials and there is a dependency on this code:
https://github.com/spring-guides/gs-async-method/tree/master/complete
If you look at the code on AppRunner.java class, I have 2 questions:
When server is starting, if I put a breakpoint in this class's constructor, seems like in the constructor, the GitHubLookupService is provided by spring, using the #Service bean that was configured. BUT, there was no #Autowired annotation on the constructor, so how in the world this constructor get called with the right dependency? It was supposed to be null.
Is it an automatic assumption of Spring Boot?
Does Spring see "private field + constructor argument, and it assumes it should look for an appropriate bean?
Is it Spring Framework or Spring boot?
Am I missing something?
As I remember, it was mendatory to provide default constructor to beans / service etc. How come this class (AppRunner) doesn't have a default constructor?
How does Spring knows that it should run the constructor with the argument?
Is it because it is the only constructor?
Starting with Spring 4.3, if a class, which is configured as a Spring bean, has only one constructor, the #Autowired annotation can be omitted and Spring will use that constructor and inject all necessary dependencies.
Regarding the default constructor: You either need the default constructor, a constructor with the #Autowired annotation when you have multiple constructors, or only one constructor in your class with or without the #Autowired annotation.
Read the #Autowired chapter from the official Spring documentation for more information.
Think of it this way... Suppose you have the following component:
#Component
public class FooService {
public FooService(Bar bar) { /*whatever*/ }
}
When Spring is scanning this class, it wants to know how it should go about constructing an instance. It's using reflection so it can get a list of all of the constructors at runtime.
In this case, it is completely unambiguous how Spring must construct this instance. There's only one constructor so there is no decision to be made, and no ambiguity at all.
If you add #Autowired here, you are not narrowing anything down, and you are not giving Spring any extra information to help make its decision - its decision is already made because there is only one candidate.
And so, as a convenience, the Spring team decided #Autowired should be optional. Since its not helping the Spring framework to make a decision, its presence is just noise.
If your component has multiple constructors then you can use #Autowired on one of them to tell Spring "use this one, not that one".

Which is better to implement a singleton in a Spring application: a bean or a static field?

I am developing Spring MVC app, i need to implement singleton pattern for some kind of utilities, ex: imageuploader and others.
My question is: in what way to implement singleton for this utilities, to initialize beans for these classes and inject where i need like Controllers, Services, DAO?, or to use static field implementation of singleton to keep instance of this class?
First, try to avoid singleton as it's considered to be a bad practice. Also their interactions with other instances are difficult to test and validate, compared to non-singleton instances.
If you absolutely need it, I'd suggest you use a Spring bean so you can exploit the autowiring mechanism and Spring's bean lifecycle.
See the Beans section of the Spring reference doc for more info.
Using a Spring bean as will allow you to easily inject a mock in unit tests. However, you will only be able to access it from other Spring beans (or objects created by Spring beans that pass in a reference to it).
Also see this discussion in this question: Difference between static class and singleton pattern?
Traditionally, you'd use PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to inject config from properties files into a Spring web-app. This blog discusses a variety of newer ways to do this with Spring.

Spring vs hibernate object creation

I recently learnt that in hibernate, we need a no-arg constructor in an entity because hibernate instantiates its entities via reflection:
Hibernate implementation. Are we paying the reflection penalty?
I got curious that whether it is the same case with Spring and found that Spring beans do not require a no-argument constructor mandatorily.
This brings me to the question that how does spring creates its objects if not by reflection - to which I think that Spring is a container and instantiates beans and injects dependencies on startup and it must be able to load the application beans via some classloader and hence it does not need reflection.
Then, I get back to the starting point with the question that hibernate also has my application class definition available then why does it need reflection to create its entities?
can somebody please confirm or correct my understanding and provide me an answer?

Getting Spring object instantiation right

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

Best Practise of injecting applicationContext in Spring3

As in the title above, I am confused about pros cons between injecting applicationContext by directly #Autowired annnotation or implementing ApplicationContextAware interface in a singleton spring bean.
Which one do you prefer in which cases and why? Thanks.
Actually, both are bad. Both of them tie your application to the Spring framework, thus inverting the whole inversion-of-control concept. In an ideal world, your application should not be aware of being managed by an ApplicationContext at all.
Once you have chosen to violate this principle, it doesn't really matter how you do it. ApplicationContextAware is the legacy version that has been around at least since Version 2.0. #Autowired is a newer mechanism but they work in pretty much the same way. I'd probably go with ApplicationContextAware, because it semantically makes clear what it is about.
As #Sean Patrick Floyd says, the need of ApplicationContext is often due to a bad design. But sometimes you have no other option. In those cases I prefer the use of #Autowired because is the way I inject all other properties. So, if I use #Autowired for injecting MyRepository, why can't I use it for ApplicationContext or any other Spring bean?
I use Spring interfaces only for those things I can't do with annotations, for example BeanNameAware.
If you need to get a prototype in a singleton then you can use method injection. Basically, you create an abstract method that returns the object you need and spring will return the prototype everytime you call that method. You define the "lookup-method" in your spring config. Here are some links:
http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/1.2.9/reference/beans.html#beans-factory-method-injection
http://java.dzone.com/articles/method-injection-spring
Since you are not extending any of the spring classes your application is always separated from the framework. Most of the cases you will not wanted to inject the ApplicationContext as it, but will need to inject the beans defined in the ApplicationContext.
The best case is always to stick to the bare minimum, until and unless you have any specific requirement and this is very simple with spring.
So either,
Annotate your beans and scan them in application context, then use #Autowire to wire them up.
Use application context to wire your bean expediencies(old xml style configs). You can use #Autowire with this approach also.
When you want to control the bean life cycle, you can read the API and customize it, but most of the time these general settings will do the job.
Here are some examples.
Spring Auto-Wiring Beans with #Autowired annotation
Spring Auto-Wiring Beans XML Style
Spring IoC container API Docs
There is no need to use ApplicationContext at all.
ObjectFactory
If you need to use prototype scoped beans in a singleton bean, inject an org.springframework.beans.factory.ObjectFactory.
For example using constructor injection:
#Service
class MyClass {
private ObjectFactory<MyDependency> myDependencyFactory;
public MyClass(ObjectFactory<MyDependency> prototypeFactory) {
myDependencyFactory = prototypeFactory;
}
}
Why
Now what's the benefit over using ApplicationContext ?
You can substitute this dependency (e.g. in a test) by simply passing a lambda (since ObjectFactory is a #FunctionalInterface) that returns a stubbed version of it.
While it is possible to stub the ApplicationContext, it is not clear in that case which beans will be looked up and need to be stubbed.

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