I'm a little confused as to how this inversion of control (IoC) works in Spring.
Say I have a service class called UserServiceImpl that implements the UserService interface.
How would this be @Autowired?
And in my Controllers, how would I instantiate an instance of this service?
Would I just do the following?
UserService userService = new UserServiceImpl();
First, and most important - all Spring beans are managed - they "live" inside a container, called "application context".
Second, each application has an entry point to that context. Web applications have a Servlet, JSF uses a el-resolver, etc. Also, there is a place where the application context is bootstrapped and all beans - autowired. In web applications this can be a startup listener.
Autowiring happens by placing an instance of one bean into the desired field in an instance of another bean. Both classes should be beans, i.e. they should be defined to live in the application context.
What is "living" in the application context? This means that the context instantiates the objects, not you. I.e. - you never make new UserServiceImpl() - the container finds each injection point and sets an instance there.
In your controllers, you just have the following:
@Controller // Defines that this class is a spring bean
@RequestMapping("/users")
public class SomeController {
// Tells the application context to inject an instance of UserService here
@Autowired
private UserService userService;
@RequestMapping("/login")
public void login(@RequestParam("username") String username,
@RequestParam("password") String password) {
// The UserServiceImpl is already injected and you can use it
userService.login(username, password);
}
}
A few notes:
applicationContext.xml you should enable the <context:component-scan> so that classes are scanned for the @Controller, @Service, etc. annotations.