Spring: Beans, Container, Metadata, IoC Instantiation

Spring fwk: Beans, Containers, Configuration Metadata, IoC Instantiation

Beans - what are they and why do we call them beans?

Any object in your Spring application which is instantiated, assembled, and otherwise managed by the Spring IoC Container is called a Bean. Nothing special about these objects, except that the configuration metadata of the Spring framework contains details of these objects as how can they be instantiated and managed by the Spring IoC Container otherwise these objects are just like any other object used by your application.

Such objects were called Beans as the Spring framework was designed and developed in response to counter-attack the complexities of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).

The Spring IoC Container

The central interface of the Spring IoC Container is BeanFactory, which is responsible for instantiating the application objects, configuring such objects, and managing the dependencies among these objects.

There are a number of implementations of this interface available today with one of the most popular being the XmlBeanFactory which allows the developers to specify the details of the object instantiation and their inter-dependencies in an XML File and the XmlBeanFactory takes care of interpreting the configuration XML metadata and subsequently providing a fully configured application taking the heavy load of object instantiation and inter-object dependency management off from the developers.

Configuration Metadata

This covers the details of object instantiation details of the application and also the details about inter-object dependencies. Depending on the form in which the metadata is supplied, the Spring framework would be required to use the corresponding type of IoC Container. The simplest and most popular form in which the metadata is supplied to the Spring framework is a simple and intuitive XML format. Evidently the XmlBeanFactory implementation of the BeanFactory interface is used as the Spring IoC Container in this case.

The other forms in which the configuration metadata can be supplied to the Spring framework are: using the Java Properties format, using Spring's public APIs to specify the metadata programmatically. Below is an image (taken from SpringFramework) which shows how all these pieces (POJOs, Config Metadata, and Container) magically fit together to produce a fully configured system ready to be used.

Instantiating the Spring IoC Container

Not always you would be required to instantiate a Spring IoC Container explicitly like in case of a Web Application some 8 lines of boilerplate code written in the Web Descriptor file named web.xml will do that for us. Otherwise we would be required to write just a few lines explicitly to instantiate the Container.

Configuration Metadata files are passed to the BeanFactory or ApplicationContext constructors in form of objects of type Resource which encapsulates the metadata details as obtained from external resources like the local file system, from the Java CLASSPATH, etc.

Few examples of Container instantiation are:

Resource resource = new FileSystemResource("beans.xml");
BeanFactory beanFactory = new XmlBeanfactory(resource);

or

ClassPathResource classPathResource = new ClassPathResource("beans.xml");
BeanFactory beanFactory = new XmlBeanFactory(classPathResource);

or

String[] appContextResorce = new String[] {"applicationContext.xml", "applicationContext-part2.xml"};
ApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(appContextResource);
BeanFactory beanFactory = (BeanFactory)applicationContext;

Which all beans/objects will have their configuration details in the Spring configuration metadata?

Well... the configuration metadata needs to have the definition of at least one bean which the container would manage. How many other bean definitions would be captured by the configuration metadata, is something which depends upon your application requirements. Spring framework supports enormous possibilities and hence it's probably limited to your application requirements and your imagination.

Some of the common entries in the configuration metadata include service layer objects, DAOs, presentation layer objects such as Struts Action instances, infrastructure objects such as Hibernate SessionFactory instances, JMS Queue references, etc.

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