java - Using Spring in standalone apps

Question

I am learning Spring and I have a question regarding how you use it in standalone applications (and also when using it for making web applications). The examples I have been coded so far has used a simple main method where I retrieve beans by calling getBean on the. Context object. However, you probably want to do this in multiple classes so do you first get a context and then call getBean or are there other cleaner alternatives? Or is this the way you do it in standalone and web apps?

Answer 1

If you're calling context.getBean() everywhere, you're probably missing the whole point of Spring, which is a dependency injection framework.

In a standalone app, you typically call context.getBean() only once (or at least, very rarely), in order to get a "root" bean. This bean is injected by Spring with other beans, and so on.

In a web app, it all depends on which framework you use. But typically, you register a listener in the web.xml which loads the context for you, and controllers are created and/or injected by Spring.