1. What is IOC (or Dependency Injection)?

The basic concept of the Inversion of Control pattern (also known as dependency injection) is that you do not create your
objects but describe how they should be created. You don't directly connect your components and services together in code
but describe which services are needed by which components in a configuration file. A container (in the case of the Spring
framework, the IOC container) is then responsible for hooking it all up.

i.e., Applying IoC, objects are given their dependencies at creation time by some external entity that coordinates each
object in the system. That is, dependencies are injected into objects. So, IoC means an inversion of responsibility with
regard to how an object obtains references to collaborating objects.

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2. What are the different types of IOC (dependency injection) ?

There are three types of dependency injection:

• Constructor Injection (e.g. Pico container, Spring etc): Dependencies are provided as constructor parameters.
• Setter Injection (e.g. Spring): Dependencies are assigned through JavaBeans properties (ex: setter methods).
• Interface Injection (e.g. Avalon): Injection is done through an interface.

Note: Spring supports only Constructor and Setter Injection

3. What are the benefits of IOC (Dependency Injection)?

Benefits of IOC (Dependency Injection) are as follows:
• Minimizes the amount of code in your application. With IOC containers you do not care about how services are
created and how you get references to the ones you need. You can also easily add additional services by adding a
new constructor or a setter method with little or no extra configuration.
• Make your application more testable by not requiring any singletons or JNDI lookup mechanisms in your unit test
cases. IOC containers make unit testing and switching implementations very easy by manually allowing you to
inject your own objects into the object under test.
• Loose coupling is promoted with minimal effort and least intrusive mechanism. The factory design pattern is more
intrusive because components or services need to be requested explicitly whereas in IOC the dependency is
injected into requesting piece of code. Also some containers promote the design to interfaces not to
implementations design concept by encouraging managed objects to implement a well-defined service interface of
your own.
• IOC containers support eager instantiation and lazy loading of services. Containers also provide support for
instantiation of managed objects, cyclical dependencies, life cycles management, and dependency resolution
between managed objects etc.

4. What is Spring ?
Spring is an open source framework created to address the complexity of enterprise application development. One of the
chief advantages of the Spring framework is its layered architecture, which allows you to be selective about which of its
components you use while also providing a cohesive framework for J2EE application development.

5. What are the advantages of Spring framework?

The advantages of Spring are as follows:

• Spring has layered architecture. Use what you need and leave you don't need now.
• Spring Enables POJO Programming. There is no behind the scene magic here. POJO programming enables
continuous integration and testability.
• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Simplifies JDBC
• Open source and no vendor lock-in.

6. What are features of Spring ?

 • Lightweight:

spring is lightweight when it comes to size and transparency. The basic version of spring framework is around 1MB.
And the processing overhead is also very negligible.

• Inversion of control (IOC):

Loose coupling is achieved in spring using the technique Inversion of Control. The objects give their dependencies
instead of creating or looking for dependent objects.

• Aspect oriented (AOP):

Spring supports Aspect oriented programming and enables cohesive development by separating application business
logic from system services.

• Container:

Spring contains and manages the life cycle and configuration of application objects.

• MVC Framework:

Spring comes with MVC web application framework, built on core Spring functionality. This framework is highly
configurable via strategy interfaces, and accommodates multiple view technologies like JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText,
and POI. But other frameworks can be easily used instead of Spring MVC Framework.

• Transaction Management:

Spring framework provides a generic abstraction layer for transaction management. This allowing the developer to
add the pluggable transaction managers, and making it easy to demarcate transactions without dealing with low-
level issues. Spring's transaction support is not tied to J2EE environments and it can be also used in container less
environments.

• JDBC Exception Handling:

The JDBC abstraction layer of the Spring offers a meaningful exception (Roll over to view the Image )
hierarchy, which simplifies the error handling strategy. Integration with
Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS: Spring provides best Integration services with
Hibernate, JDO and iBATIS
7. How many modules are there in Spring? What are they?
Spring comprises of seven modules. They are..

• The core container:

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.

• Spring context:

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.

• Spring AOP:

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.

• Spring DAO:

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.

• Spring ORM:

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.

• Spring Web module:

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.

• Spring MVC framework:

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 Injection:

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 Injection:

Constructor-based DI is realized by invoking a constructor with a number of arguments, each representing a

collaborator.

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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.

13. How is a typical spring implementation look like ?

For a typical Spring Application we need the following files:
• An interface that defines the functions.
• An Implementation that contains properties, its setter and getter methods, functions etc.,
• Spring AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming)
• A XML file called Spring configuration file.
• Client program that uses the function.
14. What is the typical Bean life cycle in Spring Bean Factory Container ?
Bean life cycle in Spring Bean Factory Container is as follows:
• The spring container finds the bean’s definition from the XML file and instantiates the bean.
• Using the dependency injection, spring populates all of the properties as specified in the bean definition
• If the bean implements the BeanNameAware interface, the factory calls setBeanName() passing the bean’s ID.
• If the bean implements the BeanFactoryAware interface, the factory calls setBeanFactory(), passing an instance of
itself.
• If there are any BeanPostProcessors associated with the bean, their post- ProcessBeforeInitialization() methods will
be called.
• If an init-method is specified for the bean, it will be called.
• Finally, if there are any BeanPostProcessors associated with the bean, their postProcessAfterInitialization() methods
will be called.

15. What do you mean by Bean wiring ?

The act of creating associations between application components (beans) within the Spring container is reffered to as Bean
wiring.
16. What do you mean by Auto Wiring?
 The Spring container is 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.
The autowiring functionality has five modes.
• no
• byName
• byType
• constructor
• autodirect
17. What is DelegatingVariableResolver?
Spring provides a custom JavaServer Faces VariableResolver implementation that extends the standard Java Server
Faces managed beans mechanism which lets you use JSF and Spring together. This variable resolver is called as
DelegatingVariableResolver

18. How to integrate Java Server Faces (JSF) with Spring?

JSF and Spring do share some of the same features, most noticeably in the area of IOC services. By declaring JSF
managed-beans in the faces-config.xml configuration file, you allow the FacesServlet to instantiate that bean at startup.
Your JSF pages have access to these beans and all of their properties.We can integrate JSF and Spring in two ways:

• DelegatingVariableResolver: Spring comes with a JSF variable resolver that lets you use JSF and Spring together.
• <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
• <!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN"
• "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">
•
• <faces-config>
• <application>
• <variable-resolver>
• org.springframework.web.jsf.DelegatingVariableResolver
• </variable-resolver>
• </application>
• </faces-config>

The DelegatingVariableResolver will first delegate value lookups to the default resolver of the underlying JSF
implementation, and then to Spring's 'business context' WebApplicationContext. This allows one to easily inject
dependencies into one's JSF-managed beans.

• FacesContextUtils:custom VariableResolver works well when mapping one's properties to beans in faces-config.xml,
but at times one may need to grab a bean explicitly. The FacesContextUtils class makes this easy. It is similar to
WebApplicationContextUtils, except that it takes a FacesContext parameter rather than a ServletContext
parameter.
•
• ApplicationContext ctx = FacesContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance());
•

More about Spring-JSF integration » »

19. What is Java Server Faces (JSF) - Spring integration mechanism?

Spring provides a custom JavaServer Faces VariableResolver implementation that extends the standard JavaServer Faces
managed beans mechanism. When asked to resolve a variable name, the following algorithm is performed:

• Does a bean with the specified name already exist in some scope (request, session, application)? If so, return it
 • Is there a standard JavaServer Faces managed bean definition for this variable name? If so, invoke it in the usual
way, and return the bean that was created.
• Is there configuration information for this variable name in the Spring WebApplicationContext for this application?
If so, use it to create and configure an instance, and return that instance to the caller.
• If there is no managed bean or Spring definition for this variable name, return null instead.
• BeanFactory also takes part in the life cycle of a bean, making calls to custom initialization and destruction
methods.

As a result of this algorithm, you can transparently use either JavaServer Faces or Spring facilities to create beans
on demand.

20. What is Significance of JSF- Spring integration ?

Spring - JSF integration is useful when an event handler wishes to explicitly invoke the bean factory to create beans on
demand, such as a bean that encapsulates the business logic to be performed when a submit button is pressed.

21. How to integrate your Struts application with Spring?

To integrate your Struts application with Spring, we have two options:

• Configure Spring to manage your Actions as beans, using the ContextLoaderPlugin, and set their dependencies in a
Spring context file.
• Subclass Spring's ActionSupport classes and grab your Spring-managed beans explicitly using a
getWebApplicationContext() method.

22. What are ORM’s Spring supports ?

Spring supports the following ORM’s :

• Hibernate
• iBatis
• JPA (Java Persistence API)
• TopLink
• JDO (Java Data Objects)
• OJB

23. What are the ways to access Hibernate using Spring ?

There are two approaches to Spring’s Hibernate integration:

• Inversion of Control with a HibernateTemplate and Callback

• Extending HibernateDaoSupport and Applying an AOP Interceptor

24. How to integrate Spring and Hibernate using HibernateDaoSupport?

Spring and Hibernate can integrate using Spring’s SessionFactory called LocalSessionFactory. The integration process is of
3 steps.

• Configure the Hibernate SessionFactory

• Extend your DAO Implementation from HibernateDaoSupport
• Wire in Transaction Support with AOP

25. What are Bean scopes in Spring Framework ?

The Spring Framework supports exactly five scopes (of which three are available only if you are using a web-aware
ApplicationContext). The scopes supported are listed below:

Scope Description

singleton Scopes a single bean definition to a single object instance per Spring IoC container.

prototype Scopes a single bean definition to any number of object instances.

 Scope Description

Scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of a single HTTP request; that is each and every HTTP
request request will have its own instance of a bean created off the back of a single bean definition. Only valid in
the context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.

Scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of a HTTP Session. Only valid in the context of a web-aware
session
Spring ApplicationContext.

global Scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of a global HTTP Session. Typically only valid when used in a
session portlet context. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.

26. What is AOP?

Aspect-oriented programming, or AOP, is a programming technique that allows programmers to modularize crosscutting
concerns, or behavior that cuts across the typical divisions of responsibility, such as logging and transaction management.
The core construct of AOP is the aspect, which encapsulates behaviors affecting multiple classes into reusable modules.

27. How the AOP used in Spring?

AOP is used in the Spring Framework: To provide declarative enterprise services, especially as a replacement for EJB
declarative services. The most important such service is declarative transaction management, which builds on the Spring
Framework's transaction abstraction.To allow users to implement custom aspects, complementing their use of OOP with
AOP.

28. What do you mean by Aspect ?

A modularization of a concern that cuts across multiple objects. Transaction management is a good example of a
crosscutting concern in J2EE applications. In Spring AOP, aspects are implemented using regular classes (the schema-based
approach) or regular classes annotated with the @Aspect annotation (@AspectJ style).

29. What do you mean by JointPoint?

A point during the execution of a program, such as the execution of a method or the handling of an exception. In Spring
AOP, a join point always represents a method execution.

30. What do you mean by Advice?

Action taken by an aspect at a particular join point. Different types of advice include "around," "before" and "after" advice.
Many AOP frameworks, including Spring, model an advice as an interceptor, maintaining a chain of interceptors "around" the
join point.

31. What are the types of Advice?

Types of advice:

• Before advice: Advice that executes before a join point, but which does not have the ability to prevent execution
flow proceeding to the join point (unless it throws an exception).
• After returning advice: Advice to be executed after a join point completes normally: for example, if a method
returns without throwing an exception.
• After throwing advice: Advice to be executed if a method exits by throwing an exception.
• After (finally) advice: Advice to be executed regardless of the means by which a join point exits (normal or
exceptional return).
• Around advice: Advice that surrounds a join point such as a method invocation. This is the most powerful kind of
advice. Around advice can perform custom behavior before and after the method invocation. It is also responsible
for choosing whether to proceed to the join point or to shortcut the advised method execution by returning its own
return value or throwing an exception

32. What are the types of the transaction management Spring supports ?
Spring Framework supports:

• Programmatic transaction management.

 • Declarative transaction management.

33. What are the benefits of the Spring Framework transaction management ?
The Spring Framework provides a consistent abstraction for transaction management that delivers the following benefits:

• Provides a consistent programming model across different transaction APIs such as JTA, JDBC, Hibernate, JPA, and
JDO.
• Supports declarative transaction management.
• Provides a simpler API for programmatic transaction management than a number of complex transaction APIs such
as JTA.
• Integrates very well with Spring's various data access abstractions.

34. Why most users of the Spring Framework choose declarative transaction management ?
Most users of the Spring Framework choose declarative transaction management because it is the option with the least
impact on application code, and hence is most consistent with the ideals of a non-invasive lightweight container.

35. Explain the similarities and differences between EJB CMT and the Spring Framework's declarative transaction
management ?
The basic approach is similar: it is possible to specify transaction behavior (or lack of it) down to individual method level.
It is
possible to make a setRollbackOnly() call within a transaction context if necessary. The differences are:

• Unlike EJB CMT, which is tied to JTA, the Spring Framework's declarative transaction management works in any
environment. It can work with JDBC, JDO, Hibernate or other transactions under the covers, with configuration
changes only.
• The Spring Framework enables declarative transaction management to be applied to any class, not merely special
classes such as EJBs.
• The Spring Framework offers declarative rollback rules: this is a feature with no EJB equivalent. Both
programmatic and declarative support for rollback rules is provided.
• The Spring Framework gives you an opportunity to customize transactional behavior, using AOP. With EJB CMT, you
have no way to influence the container's transaction management other than setRollbackOnly().
• The Spring Framework does not support propagation of transaction contexts across remote calls, as do high-end
application servers.

37. When to use programmatic and declarative transaction management ?

Programmatic transaction management is usually a good idea only if you have a small number of transactional operations.

On the other hand, if your application has numerous transactional operations, declarative transaction management is
usually worthwhile. It keeps transaction management out of business logic, and is not difficult to configure.

38. Explain about the Spring DAO support ?

The Data Access Object (DAO) support in Spring is aimed at making it easy to work with data access technologies like JDBC,
Hibernate or JDO in a consistent way. This allows one to switch between the persistence technologies fairly easily and it
also allows one to code without worrying about catching exceptions that are specific to each technology.

39. What are the exceptions thrown by the Spring DAO classes ?
Spring DAO classes throw exceptions which are subclasses of
DataAccessException(org.springframework.dao.DataAccessException).Spring provides a convenient translation from
technology-specific exceptions like SQLException to its own exception class hierarchy with the DataAccessException as the
root exception. These exceptions wrap the original exception.
40. What is SQLExceptionTranslator ?
SQLExceptionTranslator, is an interface to be implemented by classes that can translate between SQLExceptions and
Spring's own data-access-strategy-agnostic org.springframework.dao.DataAccessException.

41. What is Spring's JdbcTemplate ?

Spring's JdbcTemplate is central class to interact with a database through JDBC. JdbcTemplate provides many convenience
methods for doing things such as converting database data into primitives or objects, executing prepared and callable
statements, and providing custom database error handling.
JdbcTemplate template = new JdbcTemplate(myDataSource);

42. What is PreparedStatementCreator ?

PreparedStatementCreator:

• Is one of the most common used interfaces for writing data to database.
• Has one method – createPreparedStatement(Connection)
• Responsible for creating a PreparedStatement.
• Does not need to handle SQLExceptions.

43. What is SQLProvider ?

SQLProvider:

• Has one method – getSql()

• Typically implemented by PreparedStatementCreator implementers.
• Useful for debugging.

44. What is RowCallbackHandler ?

The RowCallbackHandler interface extracts values from each row of a ResultSet.

• Has one method – processRow(ResultSet)

• Called for each row in ResultSet.
• Typically stateful.

45. What are the differences between EJB and Spring ?

Spring and EJB feature comparison.
Feature EJB Spring
Transaction • Must use a JTA transaction manager. • Supports multiple transaction environments
management through its PlatformTransactionManager
• Supports transactions that span interface, including JTA, Hibernate, JDO, and
remote method calls. JDBC.

• Does not natively support distributed

transactions—it must be used with a JTA
transaction manager.
Declarative • Can define transactions declaratively • Can define transactions declaratively through
transaction through the deployment descriptor. the Spring configuration file or through class
support • Can define transaction behavior per metadata.
method or per class by using the • Can define which methods to apply transaction
wildcard character *. behavior explicitly or by using regular
expressions.
• Cannot declaratively define rollback
behavior—this must be done • Can declaratively define rollback behavior per
programmatically. method and per exception type.
Persistence Supports programmatic bean-managed Provides a framework for integrating with several
persistence and declarative container persistence technologies, including JDBC, Hibernate,
managed persistence. JDO, and iBATIS.
Declarative • Supports declarative security through • No security implementation out-of-the box.
security users and roles. The management
and implementation of users and • Acegi, an open source security framework built
roles is container specific. on top of Spring, provides declarative security
through the Spring configuration file or class
• Declarative security is configured in metadata.
the deployment descriptor.
Distributed Provides container-managed remote method Provides proxying for remote calls via RMI, JAX-RPC, and
computing calls. web services.