Summary

In this chapter, we covered a lot of ground with both the Spring core and IoC in general. We showed you examples of the different types of IoC and presented a discussion of the pros and cons of using each mechanism in your applications. We looked at which IoC mechanisms Spring provides and when and when not to use each within your applications. While exploring IoC, we introduced the Spring BeanFactory, which is the core component for Spring’s IoC capabilities, and then the ApplicationContext, which extends BeanFactory and provide additional functionalities. For ApplicationContext, we focused on the GenericXmlApplicationContext that allows external configuration of Spring using XML. Another method to declare DI requirements for ApplicationContext, that is, using Java annotations, was also discussed.