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Spring FAQs |
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7. How many modules are there in Spring? What are they?
Spring comprises of seven modules. They are..
The core container provides the essential functionality of the Spring framework. A primary component of the core container is the BeanFactory, an implementation of the Factory pattern. The BeanFactory applies the Inversion of Control (IOC) pattern to separate an application's configuration and dependency specification from the actual application code.
The Spring context is a configuration file that provides context information to the Spring framework. The Spring context includes enterprise services such as JNDI, EJB, e-mail, internalization, validation, and scheduling functionality.
The Spring AOP module integrates aspect-oriented programming functionality directly into the Spring framework, through its configuration management feature. As a result you can easily AOP-enable any object managed by the Spring framework. The Spring AOP module provides transaction management services for objects in any Spring-based application. With Spring AOP you can incorporate declarative transaction management into your applications without relying on EJB components.
The Spring JDBC DAO abstraction layer offers a meaningful exception hierarchy for managing the exception handling and error messages thrown by different database vendors. The exception hierarchy simplifies error handling and greatly reduces the amount of exception code you need to write, such as opening and closing connections. Spring DAO's JDBC-oriented exceptions comply to its generic DAO exception hierarchy.
The Spring framework plugs into several ORM frameworks to provide its Object Relational tool, including JDO, Hibernate, and iBatis SQL Maps. All of these comply to Spring's generic transaction and DAO exception hierarchies.
The Web context module builds on top of the application context module, providing contexts for Web-based applications. As a result, the Spring framework supports integration with Jakarta Struts. The Web module also eases the tasks of handling multi-part requests and binding request parameters to domain objects.
The Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is a full-featured MVC implementation for building Web applications. The MVC framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces and accommodates numerous view technologies including JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI.
8. What are the types of Dependency Injection Spring supports?
Setter-based DI is realized by calling setter methods on your beans after invoking a no-argument constructor or no-argument static factory method to instantiate your bean.
Constructor-based DI is realized by invoking a constructor with a number of arguments, each representing a collaborator.
9. What is Bean Factory ?
A BeanFactory is like a factory class that contains a collection of beans. The BeanFactory holds Bean Definitions of multiple beans within itself and then instantiates the bean whenever asked for by clients.
- BeanFactory is able to create associations between collaborating objects as they are instantiated. This removes the burden of configuration from bean itself and the beans client.
- BeanFactory also takes part in the life cycle of a bean, making calls to custom initialization and destruction methods.
10. What is Application Context?
A bean factory is fine to simple applications, but to take advantage of the full power of the Spring framework, you may want to move up to Springs more advanced container, the application context. On the surface, an application context is same as a bean factory.Both load bean definitions, wire beans together, and dispense beans upon request. But it also provides:
- A means for resolving text messages, including support for internationalization.
- A generic way to load file resources.
- Events to beans that are registered as listeners.
11. What is the difference between Bean Factory and Application Context ?
On the surface, an application context is same as a bean factory. But application context offers much more..
- Application contexts provide a means for resolving text messages, including support for i18n of those messages.
- Application contexts provide a generic way to load file resources, such as images.
- Application contexts can publish events to beans that are registered as listeners.
- Certain operations on the container or beans in the container, which have to be handled in a programmatic fashion with a bean factory, can be handled declaratively in an application context.
- ResourceLoader support: Spring’s Resource interface us a flexible generic abstraction for handling low-level resources. An application context itself is a ResourceLoader, Hence provides an application with access to deployment-specific Resource instances.
- MessageSource support: The application context implements MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual implementation being pluggable
12. What are the common implementations of the Application Context ?
The three commonly used implementation of 'Application Context' are
- ClassPathXmlApplicationContext : It Loads context definition from an XML file located in the classpath, treating context definitions as classpath resources. The application context is loaded from the application's classpath by using the code .
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("bean.xml");
- FileSystemXmlApplicationContext : It loads context definition from an XML file in the filesystem. The application context is loaded from the file system by using the code .
ApplicationContext context = new FileSystemXmlApplicationContext("bean.xml");
- XmlWebApplicationContext : It loads context definition from an XML file contained within a web application.
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