I'm developing a web application on Apache Tomcat 6 with Hibernate and Spring, I'm using different XML configuration files to define my Spring beans (like the Hibernate DAO, Quartz scheduler and some other stuff). All these files are loaded at Tomcat start up via web.xml (ContextLoaderListener).
Now I'm not sure what is the recommended way to get access to my beans.
Should I write on class which provides the BeanFactory for all classes which should use a bean, or is it the better way to load the BeanFactory in each class.
BeanFactory bf = (BeanFactory) ContextLoader.getCurrentWebApplicationContext();
One of the core ideas of the spring framework is to minimize dependencies between classes. You'll get the most benefit by using this concept throughout your whole project. Each and every backend object should be defined as bean and can therefore use the dependency injection automatism.
If some of your Beans need to access the ApplicationContext directly (eg for requesting all Beans implementing some marker interface) you can implement the ApplicationContextAware interface, so still no factory is needed.
Use dependency injection instead. Create getters & setters in each controller class, and use your *-servlet.xml to inject the required beans via the <property> tag. No factory needed!
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application context. What is this?
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What is Application context and bean factory in spring framework [duplicate]
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I have a Spring Boot app and it's running with Spring Data, MySQL, Spring Security and MVC. The app is running for me just as fine.
However, I keep hearing about ApplicationContext a lot and I was wondering when do I need to use it and would like to know what it does. Can someone give me an example and an overview of ApplicationContext and its use?
ApplicationContext is a core interface that Spring framework built on. If you're building a Spring application, you're already using the ApplicationContext. You can have great insight about this from Spring Framework Reference Documentation. As per this document, Spring framework consists with these modules;
The Context (spring-context) module builds on the solid base provided
by the Core and Beans modules: it is a means to access objects in a
framework-style manner that is similar to a JNDI registry. The Context
module inherits its features from the Beans module and adds support
for internationalization (using, for example, resource bundles), event
propagation, resource loading, and the transparent creation of
contexts by, for example, a Servlet container. The Context module also
supports Java EE features such as EJB, JMX, and basic remoting. The
ApplicationContext interface is the focal point of the Context module.
spring-context-support provides support for integrating common
third-party libraries into a Spring application context, in particular
for caching (EhCache, JCache) and scheduling (CommonJ, Quartz).
Spring ApplicationContext also inherits BeanFactory super-interface. So technically ApplicationContext is capable of doing all the things, BeanFactory interface is capable and much more. BeanFactory interface along with ApplicationContext provide the backbone of the Spring IoC container (Core container). Which is Bean management for your application.
The interface org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext
represents the Spring IoC container and is responsible for
instantiating, configuring, and assembling the aforementioned beans.
The container gets its instructions on what objects to instantiate,
configure, and assemble by reading configuration metadata. The
configuration metadata is represented in XML, Java annotations, or
Java code. It allows you to express the objects that compose your
application and the rich interdependencies between such objects.
ApplicationContext uses eager loading mechanism. So, every bean declared in your application, initialize right away after the application started and after, this ApplicationContext scope is pretty much read-only.
Initiate a Spring IoC container with custom bean definitions is pretty much staright forward.
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[] {"daos.xml"});
Following file shows this daos.xml file content;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">
<bean id="accountDao"
class="org.springframework.samples.jpetstore.dao.jpa.JpaAccountDao">
<!-- additional collaborators and configuration for this bean go here -->
</bean>
<bean id="itemDao" class="org.springframework.samples.jpetstore.dao.jpa.JpaItemDao">
<!-- additional collaborators and configuration for this bean go here -->
</bean>
<!-- more bean definitions for data access objects go here -->
</beans>
After that you can access the beans define in the .xml like this;
JpaItemDao obj = (JpaItemDao) factory.getBean("itemDao");
These instances are now being initialized and managed by the ApplicationContext. But most users prefer to use #Bean annotation define beans to do the binding and #Autowired annotation to do the dependency injection. So, no need to manually feed a bean .xml to custom initialized ApplicationContext.
#Configuration
class SampleConfig {
#Bean
public JpaItemDao getJpaItemDao() {
return new JpaItemDao();
}
}
and inject in;
#Component
class SampleComponent {
#Autowired
private JpaItemDao itemDao;
public void doSomething() {
itemDao.save(); // Just an example.
}
}
Besided the bean management, ApplicationContext does some other important thing in the Spring core container. As per ApplicationContect javadoc, they are;
Bean factory methods for accessing application components. Inherited from ListableBeanFactory.
The ability to load file resources in a generic fashion. Inherited from the ResourceLoader interface.
The ability to publish events to registered listeners. Inherited from the ApplicationEventPublisher interface.
The ability to resolve messages, supporting internationalization. Inherited from the MessageSource interface.
Inheritance from a parent context. Definitions in a descendant context will always take priority. This means, for example, that a
single parent context can be used by an entire web application, while
each servlet has its own child context that is independent of that of
any other servlet.
Also, checkout the sub-interfaces of ApplicationContext that specifically designed for work on different use cases like WebApplicationContext.
ApplicationContext is a core concept (arguably the most important one) of spring used also in spring boot of course but and ideally hidden from the programmers in both cases, meaning that the programmer should not directly interact with it in a business code of the application.
Technically its an interface that has many implementations, the relevant one is picked depending on in which environment you're running and how do you configure the application.
So does it do? Its a class that basically is a registry of all the beans that spring has loaded. In general, starting up the spring mean finding the beans to load and putting them in the application context (this is relevant for singletons only, prototype-scopes beans are not stored in the ApplicationContext).
Why does spring need it?
For many reasons, to name a few:
To manage lifecyle of the beans (when the application shuts down, all beans that have a destroy method should be called)
To execute a proper injection. When some class A depends on class B spring should inject class B into class A. So by the time of creating the class A, class B should already be created, right? So spring goes like this:
Creates B
Puts B into application context (registry)
Creates A
For injection goals: gets B from the application context and injects into A
// an illustration for the second bullet
class B {}
class A {
#Autowired
B b;
}
Now there are other things implemented technically in application context:
Events
Resource Loading
Inheritance of application contexts (advanced stuff, actually)
However now you have an overview of what it is.
Spring boot application encapsulates the application context but you can still access it from many places:
in the main method when the application starts it returns an application context]
you can inject it into configuration if you really need
its also possible to inject the application context into the business bean, although we shouldn't really do so.
In simple words:
Spring is popular for dependency Injection.
So all the bean definitions(Objects) will be created by the spring and maintained in the container. So all the bean life cycle will be taken care by spring container.
So ApplicationContext is a interface It has different implementations will be there to initialize the spring container.
So ApplicationContext is the reference to Spring Container.
Some popular implementations are:
AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext,
ClassPathXmlApplicationContext,
FileSystemXmlApplicationContext,
XmlWebApplicationContext.
Reference: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/context/ApplicationContext.html
I have a huge set of really old Portlets code I am being required to "refactor" due to a bug that was found in Prod. The refactor is requiring me to update to a new library, and as a result move from a custom DAO structure using "Query" classes to one that uses Springs JdbcTemplate and annotations to wire everything together.
BUT, there are a LOT of portlets. Is there a way to use Spring with Annotations for DI that does NOT require me to completely re-write the Portlet to use DispatcherPortlet and the #RequestMappings? I just want to mark all the Portlets, and the handful of Servlets as well, with #Component just to have Spring inject the classes I need. Where I am struggling is in how to bootstrap the ApplicationContext without using the Spring-provided dispatcher portlet/servlet to initiate the context. I would like to not have to use the ApplicationContext directly to pull the necessary beans out by hand, if possible. I do have contextConfigLocation and the ContextLoaderListener defined in my web.xml already.
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 want to make a call to a Spring bean (a #Component) from my message-driven bean (MDB) but have problems getting a reference to it. I've tried with a class implementing org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextAware which stores the Spring ApplicationContext in a static field in a class MyAppContext. The static field in MyAppContext is then accessed from the MDB. But MyAppContext is loaded from different classloaders. The Spring application context is correctly set in the web module classloader context, but in the MDB's classloader context, it's null.
Can I somehow instruct JBoss to use the same classloader for the web app and the MDB?
Or is there a better way than storing the Spring application context in a static field?
Thanks for any advice!
A static holder for the context is not really a good idea. To make your beans available to other applications in a Java EE environment, you should consider making use of JNDI.
Unfortunately, there is no plain JNDI exporter available out of the box, but it's fairly easy to write one yourself, as shown in this blog post: http://maestro-lab.blogspot.ro/2009/01/how-to-export-spring-managed-bean-to.html
There is however a JndiRmiServiceExporter that you may want to look at.
Once your beans are bound to names in JNDI, they can be referenced using standard CDI in your message bean without worrying about class loading issues.
Why not use "ClassPathXmlApplicationContext" to load and look up for the Spring bean you require in your MBean?
I am using a #configurable annotated Vaadin controller together with my Spring context, and it is working fine - except when I need to restart Tomcat, and the sessions are deserialized. Then I get this for my Vaadin app:
org.springframework.beans.factory.wiring.BeanConfigurerSupport BeanFactory has not been set on BeanConfigurerSupport: Make sure this configurer runs in a Spring container. Unable to configure bean of type [web.vaadin.ui.BackOfficeApplication]. Proceeding without injection.
I am thinking that this can be because the vaadin app is reserializing before the spring bean factory has a chance to?
(I am using CTW - aspectj and Spring 3.1.1.RELEASE)
Note:
It seems in the log that these errors come before the "Root WebApplicationContext: initialization started". How can it be that the beans are being autowired before the context initialization is started?
I am not an expert on (de)serialization with Spring and Tomcat, and this is not an answer but might be a workaround.
If BackOfficeApplication is your Vaadin application then there is an alternative to using #Configurable on that class. Instead, create a per-Vaadin Application Spring application context XML file and add this to it to cause your BackOfficeApplication instances to be autowired, etc.:
<bean id="backOfficeApplication"
class="org.dellroad.stuff.vaadin.ContextApplication"
factory-method="get"/>
In general, #Configurable can be more troublesome than normal bean wiring because they require the configuration to occur at object construction rather than allowing the bean factory to do the wiring later on, where it may be better able to detect loops, enforce ordering, etc.
Ideally normal bean wiring should be used for singletons that are initialized once at the beginning of the application and #Configurable should be used for "on the fly" beans created randomly during normal operation.