Spring Dependency Injection

Spring provides dependency injection capabilities using Setter injection, or Constructor injection. Object models can then be declaratively represented in XML. Here’s a Setter injection based example using the property element:

<bean name="shaker" class="net.bencode.model.Shaker">
  <property name="proteinPowder" ref="proteinPowder" />
</bean>

<bean name="proteinPowder" class="net.bencode.model.ProteinPowder">
  <property name="grams" ref="120" />
</bean>

Or if XML isn’t your thing, annotations are also an option, using a combination of @Component and @Autowired.

@Component
public class Shaker {
  @Autowired
  private ProteinPowder proteinPowder;
  ...
}

@Component
public class ProteinPowder {
  private int grams;
  ...
}

Constructor injection is similarly defined using the constructor-arg element. The following example works if the Shaker class has a constructor that takes in a ProteinPowder instance:

<bean name="shaker" class="net.bencode.model.Shaker">
  <constructor-arg index="0" ref="proteinPowder" />
</bean>

<bean name="proteinPowder" class="net.bencode.model.ProteinPowder">
  <property name="grams" ref="120" />
</bean>