Since Spring 3.0, Spring supports for the standard JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java. In Spring 3 application, you can uses standard

  1. @Inject instead of Spring’s @Autowired to inject a bean.
  2. @Named instead of Spring’s @Component to declare a bean.

Those JSR-330 standard annotations are scanned and retrieved the same way as Spring annotations, the integration just happened automatically, as long as the following jar in your classpath.

pom.xml
Markup 
	<dependency>
		<groupId>javax.inject</groupId> <artifactId>javax.inject</artifactId> <version>1</version> </dependency>

1. Spring Annotations

Let see a normal Spring’s annotation example – @Autowired and @Component

P.S @Component, @Repository and @Service are same, just declares a bean in Spring Ioc context.

CustomerDAO.java
Java 
package com.mkyong.customer.dao; import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository; @Repository public class CustomerDAO { public void save() { System.out.println("CustomerDAO save method..."); } }
CustomerService.java
Java 
package com.mkyong.customer.services; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired; import org.springframework.stereotype.Service; import com.mkyong.customer.dao.CustomerDAO; @Service public class CustomerService { @Autowired CustomerDAO customerDAO; public void save() { System.out.println("CustomerService save method..."); customerDAO.save(); } }

2. JSR-330 Annotations

Basically, it works the same, just with different annotations – @Inject and @Named.

CustomerDAO.java
Java 
package com.mkyong.customer.dao; import javax.inject.Named; @Named public class CustomerDAO { public void save() { System.out.println("CustomerDAO save method..."); } }
CustomerService.java
Java 
package com.mkyong.customer.services; import javax.inject.Inject; import javax.inject.Named; import com.mkyong.customer.dao.CustomerDAO; @Named public class CustomerService { @Inject CustomerDAO customerDAO; public void save() { System.out.println("CustomerService save method..."); customerDAO.save(); } }

3. Run it

Both Spring and JSR330 annotations need component scan to works.

Spring-AutoScan.xml – Scan bean automatically
Markup 
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd"> <context:component-scan base-package="com.mkyong.customer" /> </beans>
App.java – Run it
Java 
package com.mkyong;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext; import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext; import com.mkyong.customer.services.CustomerService; public class App { public static void main( String[] args ) { ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[] {"Spring-AutoScan.xml"}); CustomerService cust = (CustomerService)context.getBean("customerService"); cust.save(); } }

Above two examples are generated the same output

Bash 
CustomerService save method...
CustomerDAO save method...

4. JSR-330 Limitations

There are some limitations on JSR-330 if compare to Spring :

  1. @Inject has no “required” attribute to make sure the bean is injected successful.
  2. In Spring container, JSR-330 has scope singleton by default, but you can use Spring’s @Scope to define others.
  3. No equivalent to Spring’s @Value, @Required or @Lazy.

Check out this Spring references.

5. Go for JSR-330

In fact, Spring’s annotations are more powerful, but only available on Spring framework. The JSR-330 is a standard spec, and it’s supported on all J2ee environment that follow the JSR-330 spec.

For new or migration project, it’s always recommended to use JSR-330 annotations, and remember, it works on Spring 3 as well.

Download Source Code

Download it –  Spring-JSR330-Example.zip (27kb)

References