Understanding Spring @Autowired usage

TL;DR

The @Autowired annotation spares you the need to do the wiring by yourself in the XML file (or any other way) and just finds for you what needs to be injected where and does that for you.

Full explanation

The @Autowired annotation allows you to skip configurations elsewhere of what to inject and just does it for you. Assuming your package is com.mycompany.movies you have to put this tag in your XML (application context file):

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

This tag will do an auto-scanning. Assuming each class that has to become a bean is annotated with a correct annotation like @Component (for simple bean) or @Controller (for a servlet control) or @Repository (for DAO classes) and these classes are somewhere under the package com.mycompany.movies, Spring will find all of these and create a bean for each one. This is done in 2 scans of the classes - the first time it just searches for classes that need to become a bean and maps the injections it needs to be doing, and on the second scan it injects the beans. Of course, you can define your beans in the more traditional XML file or with an @Configuration class (or any combination of the three).

The @Autowired annotation tells Spring where an injection needs to occur. If you put it on a method setMovieFinder it understands (by the prefix set + the @Autowired annotation) that a bean needs to be injected. In the second scan, Spring searches for a bean of type MovieFinder, and if it finds such bean, it injects it to this method. If it finds two such beans you will get an Exception. To avoid the Exception, you can use the @Qualifier annotation and tell it which of the two beans to inject in the following manner:

@Qualifier("redBean")
class Red implements Color {
   // Class code here
}

@Qualifier("blueBean")
class Blue implements Color {
   // Class code here
}

Or if you prefer to declare the beans in your XML, it would look something like this:

<bean id="redBean" class="com.mycompany.movies.Red"/>

<bean id="blueBean" class="com.mycompany.movies.Blue"/>

In the @Autowired declaration, you need to also add the @Qualifier to tell which of the two color beans to inject:

@Autowired
@Qualifier("redBean")
public void setColor(Color color) {
  this.color = color;
}

If you don't want to use two annotations (the @Autowired and @Qualifier) you can use @Resource to combine these two:

@Resource(name="redBean")
public void setColor(Color color) {
  this.color = color;
}

The @Resource (you can read some extra data about it in the first comment on this answer) spares you the use of two annotations and instead, you only use one.

I'll just add two more comments:

Good practice would be to use @Inject instead of @Autowired because it is not Spring-specific and is part of the JSR-330 standard. Another good practice would be to put the @Inject / @Autowired on a constructor instead of a method. If you put it on a constructor, you can validate that the injected beans are not null and fail fast when you try to start the application and avoid a NullPointerException when you need to actually use the bean.

Update: To complete the picture, I created a new question about the @Configuration class.

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Nothing in the example says that the "classes implementing the same interface". MovieCatalog is a type and CustomerPreferenceDao is another type. Spring can easily tell them apart.

In Spring 2.x, wiring of beans mostly happened via bean IDs or names. This is still supported by Spring 3.x but often, you will have one instance of a bean with a certain type - most services are singletons. Creating names for those is tedious. So Spring started to support "autowire by type".

What the examples show is various ways that you can use to inject beans into fields, methods and constructors.

The XML already contains all the information that Spring needs since you have to specify the fully qualified class name in each bean. You need to be a bit careful with interfaces, though:

This autowiring will fail:

 @Autowired
 public void prepare( Interface1 bean1, Interface1 bean2 ) { ... }

Since Java doesn't keep the parameter names in the byte code, Spring can't distinguish between the two beans anymore. The fix is to use @Qualifier:

 @Autowired
 public void prepare( @Qualifier("bean1") Interface1 bean1,
     @Qualifier("bean2")  Interface1 bean2 ) { ... }

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Yes, you can configure the Spring servlet context xml file to define your beans (i.e., classes), so that it can do the automatic injection for you. However, do note, that you have to do other configurations to have Spring up and running and the best way to do that, is to follow a tutorial ground up.

Once you have your Spring configured probably, you can do the following in your Spring servlet context xml file for Example 1 above to work (please replace the package name of com.movies to what the true package name is and if this is a 3rd party class, then be sure that the appropriate jar file is on the classpath) :

<beans:bean id="movieFinder" class="com.movies.MovieFinder" />

or if the MovieFinder class has a constructor with a primitive value, then you could something like this,

<beans:bean id="movieFinder" class="com.movies.MovieFinder" >
    <beans:constructor-arg value="100" />
</beans:bean>

or if the MovieFinder class has a constructor expecting another class, then you could do something like this,

<beans:bean id="movieFinder" class="com.movies.MovieFinder" >
    <beans:constructor-arg ref="otherBeanRef" />
</beans:bean>

...where 'otherBeanRef' is another bean that has a reference to the expected class.

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