Here, several questions have been asked by many developers about difference between Spring-Rest and JAX-RS.
And, I have also learned that Spring is not following any specification and Spring framework has their own implementation then
Why Spring allows all that Annotations which are supported/used by JAX-RS by default?
Spring does not support JAX-RS annotations. If there is a situation where you think they do, then you are mistaken or it's just a coincidence. Period. If you will add any JAX-RS annotations in my Spring MVC program, nothing will happen. Annotations are just metadata. They are not programs. If Spring does not recognize the metadata, it will ignore it. But if you use a JAX-RS annotation in place of a Spring annotation that is used for the same purpose, respective of their framework, then you will not get the expected Spring behavior. So basically, if you are using Spring MVC, remove any JAX-RS dependencies so you don't mistakenly use them.
I want to understand what is the exact meaning of term "autowiring" and AOP in Spring Framework.
From the official Spring Framework Reference:
The Spring container can autowire relationships between collaborating
beans. You can allow Spring to resolve collaborators (other beans)
automatically for your bean by inspecting the contents of the
ApplicationContext.
Which basically means you can leave it up to the Spring Framework to initialize your beans and ensure they're there when you need them. For example, lets say I have a number of Things in my app. Now, if I want to get all the Things and have them placed in a List<Thing>, in Spring (assuming I've configured it properly), I can simply use this code:
#Autowired
private List<Thing> things;
With no additional effort on my part I have the list I needed.
The question concerning Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) as it relates to Spring would be quite a bit to put in a post. The simple explanation can be seen in the official Spring Framework Reference:
Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements Object-Oriented
Programming (OOP) by providing another way of thinking about program
structure. The key unit of modularity in OOP is the class, whereas in
AOP the unit of modularity is the aspect. Aspects enable the
modularization of concerns such as transaction management that cut
across multiple types and objects. (Such concerns are often termed
crosscutting concerns in AOP literature.)
One of the key components of Spring is the AOP framework. While the
Spring IoC container does not depend on AOP, meaning you do not need
to use AOP if you don’t want to, AOP complements Spring IoC to provide
a very capable middleware solution.
That section is very detailed and worth a read if you're interested in AOP.
Autowiring is a mechanism of resolving dependencies in Spring IoC container, as per Spring Reference. So instead of directly specifying the dependency (in XML or in Java configuration), you can depend on container itself to provide you with candidate(s). Spring itself should abort if you find more than one matching dependency (unless you are looking for a collection of beans).
There are many people who advised me to use Spring Boot instead of Spring to develop REST web services.
I want to know what exactly the difference between the two is?
In short
Spring Boot reduces the need to write a lot of configuration and boilerplate code.
It has an opinionated view on Spring Platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum effort.
Easy to create standalone applications with embedded Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow.
Provides metrics, health checks, and externalized configuration.
You can read more here http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/
Unfortunately and I mean this out of personal frustration with Spring boot, I have yet to see any real quantified list, where the differences are explicitly outlined.
There is only qualifications such as the rubbish sentence "...opinionated view..." which are bandied about.
What is clear, is that SpringBoot has wrapped up groups of Spring annotations into its own set of annotations, implicitly.
Further obfuscating, and making the need for anyone starting out in SpringBoot to have to commit to memory what a particular SpringBoot annotation represents.
My reply therefore is of no quantifiable benefit to the original question, which is analogous to that of the SpringBoot authors.
Those behind Spring IMO deliberately set-out to obfuscate, which reflects the obtuseness of their JavaDoc and API's (see SpringBatch API's as an example, if you think I am flaming) that makes one wonder the value of their open-source ethos.
My quest for figuring out SpringBoot continues.
Update. 22-08-2022
Read this (https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/using.html#using.auto-configuration) and you will figure out for yourself what "opinionated" means.
There are over 140 Config classes that Springboot can use for this opinionated view, depending on what is on your classpath.
yes, on your classpath.
Finally and bizzarely, the annotation #SpringBootApplication is a configuration annotation as it includes it.
Go figure :=)
Basically, Spring Boot is an opinionated instance of a Spring application.
Spring Boot is a rapid application development platform. It uses various components of Spring, but has additional niceties like the ability to package your application as a runnable jar, which includes an embedded tomcat (or jetty) server. Additionally, Spring Boot contains a LOT of auto-configuration for you (the opinionated part), where it will pick and choose what to create based on what classes/beans are available or missing.
I would echo their sentiment that if you are going to use Spring I can't think of any reasons to do it without Spring Boot.
Spring Boot is opinionated view of Spring Framework projects.Let's analyse it through one program taken from Spring Boot Documentation.
#RestController
#EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Example {
#RequestMapping("/")
String home() {
return "Hello World!";
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SpringApplication.run(Example.class, args);
}
}
It's a very basic REST API and you need to add Spring-boot-starter-web in your POM.xml for the same. Since you have added starter-web dependency, the annotation
#EnableAutoConfiguration guesses that you want to develop a web application and sets up Spring accordingly.
Spring Boot auto-configuration attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the jar dependencies that you have added. For example, if HSQLDB is on your classpath, and you have not manually configured any database connection beans, then Spring Boot auto-configures an in-memory database.
It's opinionated like maven. Maven creates a project structure for you which it thinks is the general pattern of projects like it adds src/main/java folder or resource folder for you.
Spring boot helps in faster development. It has many starter projects that helps you get going quite faster. It also includes many non functional features like: embedded servers, security, metrics, health checks etc. In short, it makes, spring based application development easier with minimally invading code(Less configuration files, less no of annotations).
Reference: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/htmlsingle/#boot-documentation-about
For developing common Spring applications or starting to learn Spring, I think using Spring Boot would be recommended. It considerably eases the job, is production ready and is rapidly being widely adopted.
Spring Boot is supposedly opinionated, i.e. it heavily advocates a certain style of rapid development, but it is designed well enough to accommodate exceptions to the rule, if you will. In short, it is a convention over configuration methodology that is willing to understand your need to break convention when warranted
For Spring Framework, you need to configure your project using XML configuration or Java configuration.
But for Spring Boot, these are preconfigured according to Spring team's view for rapid development. That is why Spring Boot is said to be an "opinionated view" of Spring Framework. It follows Convention over Configuration design paradigm.
Note: These configurations include view resolvers for MVC, transaction managers, way of locating container managed beans (Spring beans) and many more. And of course you can override any of these preconfigurations according to your need.
Spring Boot supports embedded servlet containers like Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow to create standalone applications, which Spring Framework doesn't.
Spring eliminate boilerplate code.
Spring-boot eliminates boilerplate configurations.
more
I would like to migrate an application from Spring 3 to Weld. In order not to rewrite the whole bean configuration at once, it would be cool if I could inject part of the application that is still written in Spring in the new CDI part.
Is that possible?
This should be possible. CDI has an extension system where you can hook into the injection mechanism. From there you can manually bootstrap your Spring beans and then return those.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's already an extension for this, so before looking into writing one yourself check if there's not one already.
There have been a few attempts at making CDI and Spring work together. Take a look at CDI Advocate for one.
It comes down to how much of your app is spring. If you're running something like Spring MVC, it'll be very difficult since it manages essentially your whole app.
Why are people using Spring DI vs. JSR330 DI? I see many projects still going forward at a huge speed with spring DI oblivious to the JSR330 specification. Many don't even know it exists. Was it not marketed enough and spring was?
I do see posts of Guice vs. spring, but the real argument should be JSR330 vs. spring since spring does not implement the spec yet(and hopefully one day it will). Any ideas on why such a large portion of the community seems oblivious to JSR330 and not evolving to it?
NOTE: I should make a correction here. Spring 3.0 does implement JSR330 and even has a way to override the default bindings much like guice except you have to supply an xml file instead of a Module file written in java.
I would say it is because Spring is so much more than just a simple DI container. Many teams use Spring for these other various reasons:
Transaction Management
Security
MVC
Aspects
Data Access
Batch processes
Webflow
Web Services
Many others...
They have their hands in so many things that it just makes it easy mix and match Spring technologies to do general enterprise development.
Spring 3.X supports JSR-330 out fo the box - http://blog.credera.com/topic/technology-solutions/java/springone-2gx-2011-summary/
It means that you can use the spring annotations or the JSR-330 ones.