Spring Tutorials

This page lists down all Spring tutorial and examples available on HowToDoInJava.com. This page will be updated everytime, I will write any post on Spring framework. Feel free to suggest topics you want to read more on.

Spring Core Tutorials

• Spring bean scopes
  The beans in spring container can be created in five scopes. singleton, prototype, request, session and global-session. Learn them in detail.
• Spring bean life cycle call back methods
  Spring framework provides following 4 ways for controlling life cycle events of bean:
  1. InitializingBean and DisposableBean callback interfaces
  2. Other Aware interfaces for specific behavior
  3. custom init() and destroy() methods in bean configuration file
  4. @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy annotations
• Spring beans autowiring
  In spring framework, setting bean dependencies in configuration files is a good practice to follow, but the spring container is also able to autowire relationships between collaborating beans. This means that it is possible to automatically let Spring resolve collaborators (other beans) for your bean by inspecting the contents of the BeanFactory. Learn how to do it.
• Bean autowire byType
  Autowiring by type allows a property to be autowired if there is exactly one bean of the property type in the container. If there is more than one, a fatal exception is thrown, and this indicates that you may not use byType autowiring for that bean. Learn in detail.
• Bean autowire byName
  Autowiring by name allows a property to be autowired such that it will inspect the container and look for a bean named exactly the same as the property which needs to be autowired. Learn more.
• Bean autowire by constructor
  Autowiring by constructor is similar to byType, but applies to constructor arguments. In autowire enabled bean, it will look for class type of constructor arguments, and then do a autowire by type on all constructor arguments. Learn more.
• Bean autowire by autodetect
  Autowiring by autodetect uses either of two modes i.e. constructor or byType modes. First it will try to look for valid constructor with arguments, If found the constructor mode is chosen. If there is no constructor defined in bean, or explicit default no-args constructor is present, the autowire byType mode is chosen. Learn more.
• How to create beans using FactoryBean
  A factory bean is a bean that serves as a factory for creating other beans within the IoC container. Conceptually, a factory bean is very similar to a factory method, but it is a Spring-specific bean that can be identified by the Spring IoC container during bean construction and can be used by container to instantiate other beans. Learn how to create beans using Spring FactoryBean.
• How to create beans using static factory method
  In you want to create a bean in the Spring by invoking a static factory method, whose purpose is to encapsulate the object-creation process in a static method then you could use factory-method attribute.
• How to declare beans from final static field references using util:constant
  If you have final static fields in some bean and you want to use those references as beans in application context file to inject into another beans, you can do so using <util:constant> tag.
• How to load external resources / files into spring context?
  Many times you would like to load external resources or files (e.g. text files, XML files, properties file, or image files) into your spring application context. Spring’s resource loader provides a unified getResource() method for you to retrieve an external resource by a resource path.
• How to create bean post processors
  A bean post processor allows additional processing before and after the bean initialization callback method. The main characteristic of a bean post processor is that it will process all the bean instances in the IoC container one by one, not just a single bean instance. Learn to create such post processors using BeanPostProcessor interface class.
• How to resolve Text Messages : ResourceBundleMessageSource Example
  For an application to support internationalization, it requires the capability of resolving text messages for different locales. Spring’s application context is able to resolve text messages for a target locale by their keys. Learn how to support i10n using ResourceBundleMessageSource class.
• How to publish and listen application events
  Sometimes in your spring application, you may want to add capability of listening specific events so that you can process these events as per application logic. Let’s learn how we can achieve this publish and listen events in your spring application.
• How to use @Component, @Repository, @Service and @Controller Annotations?
  With @Component, @Repository, @Service and @Controller annotations in place and after enabling automatic component scanning, spring will automatically import the beans into the container so you don’t have to define them explicitly with XML. These annotations are called Stereotype annotations as well.
• @Required Annotation and RequiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor Example
  In real life application, you will not be interested in checking all the bean properties configured in your context files. Rather you would like to check if particular set of properties have been set or not in some specific beans only. Spring’s dependency checking feature using “dependency-check” attribute, will not able to help you in this case. So solve this problem, you can use @Required annotation.

Spring Framework Best Practices

• 13 best practices for writing spring configuration files
  Spring beans, dependencies, and the services needed by beans are specified in xml configuration files or annotations. The XML configuration files, however, are verbose and more clean. If not planned and written correctly, it becomes very hard to manage in big projects. In this article, I will show you 13 best practices for writing spring XML configurations.

Inversion of control and dependency injection

• Inversion of control (IoC) and dependency injection (DI) patterns
  In traditional programming, the flow of the business logic is determined by objects that are statically assigned to one another. With inversion of control, the flow depends on the object graph that is instantiated by the assembler and is made possible by object interactions being defined through abstractions. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. Read this post for a detailed information.

Spring REST

• REST APIs using Spring 3 MVC
  A step by step guide for creating a RESTful web service application using Spring 3 mvc. This post covers all requited dependencies, annotations applied and a working application demo, which you can download for free.
• Spring REST Hello World XML Example
  Learn to write REST APIs capable of returning XML representations of resources.
• Spring REST Hello World JSON Example
  Learn to write REST APIs capable of returning JSON representations of resources.
• Spring RESTFul Client – RestTemplate Example
  Learn to build a RESTFul client to consume REST APIs written in previous examples.

Spring ORM

• Spring 3 and hibernate integration tutorial with example
  This tutorial is focused on usage of Hibernate with Spring 3 framework. I will show that how a basic end to end application flow looks like as a result of this integration.
• Spring 3.2.5.RELEASE and Hibernate 4 Integration Example
  In previous example, lots of people struggled in resolving maven dependencies. In this example, I have added all required jar files in project sourcecode itself. Additionally, I have advanced the version of spring from 3.0.5 to 3.2.5.RELEASE.
• Spring AbstractRoutingDataSource example
  AbstractRoutingDataSource is very useful feature in spring framework if you do have a design which permits multiple databases based on certain criteria which may change for each user request. An example can be use of database. You can use a particular database when user belongs to certain locale and switch to another locale if user belongs to another locale.
• Using SQL Scripts with Spring JDBC + JPA + HSQLDB
  Using custom SQL scripts in spring to initialize the database at startup of application with appropriate tables and data populated inside it.

Spring Integration

• Spring 3 standalone integration with hornetq
  HornetQ is an open source project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, very high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system. HornetQ comes with a lot of flexibility to be configured with some existing application frameworks. In this post, I am demonstrating the usage of HornetQ with Spring 3.
• Spring 4 + Struts 2 + Hibernate Integration
  All important points to keep in mind when integration spring framework with struts in conjunction with hibernate.
• Spring 3 JSTL Integration with Maven
  How to add JSTL support to Spring 3 using maven build tool.

Misc Examples

• Spring Email : JavaMailSender example
  A simple example to show how to send emails with Spring framework.

Spring Unit Test

• Unit testing authorization in junit
  The main motive of this post to describe the way to build fully populated authentication object programmatically and then use it in unit testing and possibly in application code itself.

Spring Transactions

• Spring transactions on non-public methods with load-time weaving
  Learn to apply transactions in any spring application on non-public methods (by deault spring AOP can only advise public methods of beans declared in the IoC container). Using this technique, you can manage transactions for nonpublic methods, or on any methods into objects which are created outside the Spring IoC.

References

Spring 3 documentation
Spring 4 documentation