[java] Understanding Spring @Autowired usage

I am reading the spring 3.0.x reference documentation to understand Spring Autowired annotation:

3.9.2 @Autowired and @Inject

I am not able to understand the below examples. Do we need to do something in the XML for it to work?

EXAMPLE 1

public class SimpleMovieLister {

    private MovieFinder movieFinder;

    @Autowired
    public void setMovieFinder(MovieFinder movieFinder) {
        this.movieFinder = movieFinder;
    }

    // ...
}

EXAMPLE 2

public class MovieRecommender {

    private MovieCatalog movieCatalog;

    private CustomerPreferenceDao customerPreferenceDao;

    @Autowired
    public void prepare(MovieCatalog movieCatalog,
                    CustomerPreferenceDao customerPreferenceDao) {
        this.movieCatalog = movieCatalog;
        this.customerPreferenceDao = customerPreferenceDao;
    }

    // ...
}

How can the two classes be autowired implementing the same interface and using the same class?

Example:

class Red implements Color
class Blue implements Color

class myMainClass{
    @Autowired 
    private Color color;

    draw(){
        color.design(); 
    } 
}

Which design method will be called? How do I make sure the design method of Red class will be called and not Blue?

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 ) { ... }

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.