The application-context.xml file we saw in the previous Spring application sample is a very minimal example for XML-based configuration metadata. Beans are configured as <bean/> elements inside a top-level <beans> element.

Classes representing the service layer (core business logic, also known as Service classes), Data Access Objects (DAOs), managed web backing beans (such as Struts action instances and JSF managed beans), infrastructure objects (such as Hibernate session factories and JMS queues), and so forth, are excellent candidates for Spring beans. Fine-grained domain objects are not generally configured as Spring beans, because it is usually the responsibility of DAOs and the business logic to create and load domain objects—Hibernate entities are typical examples.

You can create a consolidated (root) ApplicationContext XML file that imports other XML files representing various layers of the application:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans ...>

   <import resource="/xml-data-access-objects.xml"/>
   <import resource="/xml-services.xml"/>
   <import resource="/web-beans.xml"/>
   <import resource="/rest-endpoints.xml"/>
...
   <bean id="systemSettings" class="com...SystemSettings">
</beans>

This method relies on bytecode metadata to wire up components instead of XML-based angle bracket declarations. Configuration of a bean is defined at the source level of the bean itself, in the form of annotations at class, field, or method levels.

Let's take a look at the simplest Spring bean configured by source-level annotation:

@Component("Greeter")
public class GreetingServiceImpl implements GreetingService {

   Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GreetingService.class);

   public void greet(String message) {
      logger.info("Greetings! " + message);
   }
}

This is just an annotated version of the same GreetingServiceImpl shown in the Your first Spring application section, where it was configured in the application-context.xml file purely in XML form. In this preceding listing, the annotation @Component makes it a Spring bean. Now, it doesn't require to be defined in XML, but you should instruct your ApplicationContext to consider annotations, as given in the following code:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.springessentialsbook"/>

This code snippet in your application-context.xml file forces ApplicationContext to scan the entire application, including all its dependencies—even inside JAR files—for components annotated as Spring beans of various stereotypes, such as @Component, @Service, @Repository, and @Controller. In addition to component scanning, the ApplicationContext looks for all the annotations in that bean at the class, property, constructor, and method levels (including setter methods) in order to inject dependencies and other behaviors into your beans at startup.

Beware, component scanning can be time consuming if you provide a broader package name to the base-package attribute; it is advised to provide more specific package names to scan (for example, a set of comma-separated package names) so that you have more control. You can narrow down your component scanning even further using <context:include-filter/> and <context:exclude-filter/>.

Another simple instruction to enable annotation configuration is <context:annotation-config/>. It simply looks for annotations on beans registered in the application context and will not detect the components, whereas if you use <context:component-scan/>, it handles both component scanning and other annotations, which will be covered later in this chapter, so you do not need to explicitly declare <context:annotation-config/>. So, the best method for annotation-based configuration is to use <context:annotation-config/>.

XML-based configuration has some advantages over its annotation-based counterpart. The biggest one is that all your bean definitions are in one place and not scattered in many classes or even JAR dependencies. XML allows you to split your metadata files and then combine them using <import/>. Using XML, you can configure any class, including third-party ones such as Spring beans, and inject dependencies and other services into it, which is impossible in the case of annotation. Also, you can define the same class as multiple different beans, each with a different name, dependencies, configuration, and so on.

Annotation-based metadata too has some advantages over XML configuration. It is more concise and much easier to develop and maintain, as your annotation and DI are right inside your source code. All information about a class is in one place.

For bigger applications, the best option would be a mixed approach where the more reusable beans (libraries shared between multiple projects) and third-party components are configured in XML and those with a smaller scope are annotated.

Spring provides further component stereotypes for beans that represent various roles. The primary stereotype is @Component, and all the others are its specializations for more specific use cases:

Custom stereotypes can be created by defining meta-annotations from scratch or combining existing annotations.

Starting with Spring 3.0, you can configure Spring metadata purely inside Java classes, completely avoiding any XML configuration while enhancing annotation-based metadata. You annotate any Java class with @Configuration annotation at the class level and have methods annotated as @Configuration annotation on a factory method that instantiates an @Component annotation, or any other specialized bean, to define your application context. Let's see a simple example:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.springessentialsbook")
public class SpringJavaConfigurator {

    @Autowired
    private GreetingService greeter;

    @Autowired
    private BannerService banner;

    @Bean
    public BannerService createBanner() {
        return new BannerService();
    }

    public BannerService getBanner() {
        return this.banner;
    }

    public void run() {
        this.banner.displayBanner();
        this.greeter.greet("I am the Greeter Spring bean, configured with Java Configuration.");
    }
}

In SpringJavaConfigurator.java, the Java configuration class configures the Spring beans, replacing the application-context.xml file. Your Spring application can directly depend on this Configuration class for loading ApplicationContext.

Typically, you use an AnnotationConfigApplication instance for instantiating your application context:

ApplicationContext ctx = new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(
  SpringJavaConfigurator.class);
SpringJavaConfigurator app = ctx.getBean(SpringJavaConfigurator.class);
app.run();
BannerService banner = ctx.getBean(BannerService.class);
banner.displayBanner();

When @Configuration classes are provided as the constructor argument, the @Configuration class itself is registered as a bean definition and so are all declared @Bean methods within the class. Spring will scan for the entire project and its dependencies for @Component or its specializations (the other stereotypes listed previously), matching the argument values provided in @ComponentScan(basePackages = "…") with all other relevant annotations and building the application context.

The advantage of JavaConfig metadata is that you have programmatic control over Spring configuration while separating out the entire DI and bean configuration into a separate Java class. Using JavaConfig, you eliminate the complexity of managing many XML files. You detect any configuration issues during development at the earliest, as JavaConfig fails during compilation itself, while in the case of XML, you will know about the configuration issues only on application startup.

Besides Spring-specific annotations, Spring supports JSR 330 standard annotations for DI, starting from Spring 3.0. You just need to include javax.inject artifacts in your Maven or Gradle configuration.

JSR 330 standard annotations have the following equivalents in Spring:

While the default scope of Spring beans is singleton, the JSR 330 default scope is like Spring's prototype. However, for consistency, Spring treats JSR 330 annotated beans inside Spring as singleton, unless declared prototype explicitly using @Scope("..").

JSR 330 has no equivalents for some Spring-based DI annotations, such as @Value, @Required, and @Lazy. We will discuss more about bean scopes later in this chapter.