I am trying out the toothpick DI library and I seem to miss something crucial.
I created the following test project on github where I tried to make a smallest possible use case for my understanding issue.
There you will find the ApplicationModule where I try to inject everything I need in my "root" module. As you can see there, I have twice scope.installModules(module) because my PlainPojo depends on the Application instance. If I do not do the first installModule call, I have no application instance in the scope. I could, as mentioned in the comment, pass the application instance as a parameter but I thought that I can remove them when I use DI?
The second class that causes troubles is the SimpleTest class. If I do not call the inject() method in the constructor, the PlainPojo member will not be injected. I also tried to use a third time the installModules() in the ApplicationModule after binding the PlainPojo but that does not help.
Am I so wrong to assume that an #Inject on a member is enough to automatically inject it when it is available in the scope and that the order of binding is enough to make previous bindings available without installing in between (like done in ApplicationModule)?
If I can provide anything more to make my issue(s) understandable please leave a comment.
Thanks in advance!
Toothpick can only inject dependencies automatically when it creates the instance of the depended object itself (e.g it is annotated with #Singleton or there is a direct binding for the class).
Otherwise you have to manually call Toothpick.inject, just like you do in SimpleTest. There is no way for TP to know when you call the constructor of PlainPojo.
You could just use
module.bind(PlainPojo.class);
module.bind(SimpleTest.class);
and maybe scope them as singletons if needed.
I asked a general Spring question: Auto-cast Spring Beans and had multiple people respond that calling Spring's ApplicationContext.getBean() should be avoided as much as possible. Why is that?
How else should I gain access to the beans I configured Spring to create?
I'm using Spring in a non-web application and had planned on accessing a shared ApplicationContext object as described by LiorH.
Amendment
I accept the answer below, but here's an alternate take by Martin Fowler who discusses the merits of Dependency Injection vs. using a Service Locator (which is essentially the same as calling a wrapped ApplicationContext.getBean()).
In part, Fowler states, "With service locator the application class asks for it [the service] explicitly by a message to the locator. With injection there is no explicit request, the service appears in the application class - hence the inversion of control.
Inversion of control is a common feature of frameworks, but it's something that comes at a price. It tends to be hard to understand and leads to problems when you are trying to debug. So on the whole I prefer to avoid it [Inversion of Control] unless I need it. This isn't to say it's a bad thing, just that I think it needs to justify itself over the more straightforward alternative."
I mentioned this in a comment on the other question, but the whole idea of Inversion of Control is to have none of your classes know or care how they get the objects they depend on. This makes it easy to change what type of implementation of a given dependency you use at any time. It also makes the classes easy to test, as you can provide mock implementations of dependencies. Finally, it makes the classes simpler and more focused on their core responsibility.
Calling ApplicationContext.getBean() is not Inversion of Control! While it's still easy to change what implemenation is configured for the given bean name, the class now relies directly on Spring to provide that dependency and can't get it any other way. You can't just make your own mock implementation in a test class and pass that to it yourself. This basically defeats Spring's purpose as a dependency injection container.
Everywhere you want to say:
MyClass myClass = applicationContext.getBean("myClass");
you should instead, for example, declare a method:
public void setMyClass(MyClass myClass) {
this.myClass = myClass;
}
And then in your configuration:
<bean id="myClass" class="MyClass">...</bean>
<bean id="myOtherClass" class="MyOtherClass">
<property name="myClass" ref="myClass"/>
</bean>
Spring will then automatically inject myClass into myOtherClass.
Declare everything in this way, and at the root of it all have something like:
<bean id="myApplication" class="MyApplication">
<property name="myCentralClass" ref="myCentralClass"/>
<property name="myOtherCentralClass" ref="myOtherCentralClass"/>
</bean>
MyApplication is the most central class, and depends at least indirectly on every other service in your program. When bootstrapping, in your main method, you can call applicationContext.getBean("myApplication") but you should not need to call getBean() anywhere else!
Reasons to prefer Service Locator over Inversion of Control (IoC) are:
Service Locator is much, much easier for other people to following in your code. IoC is 'magic' but maintenance programmers must understand your convoluted Spring configurations and all the myriad of locations to figure out how you wired your objects.
IoC is terrible for debugging configuration problems. In certain classes of applications the application will not start when misconfigured and you may not get a chance to step through what is going on with a debugger.
IoC is primarily XML based (Annotations improve things but there is still a lot of XML out there). That means developers can't work on your program unless they know all the magic tags defined by Spring. It is not good enough to know Java anymore. This hinders less experience programmers (ie. it is actually poor design to use a more complicated solution when a simpler solution, such as Service Locator, will fulfill the same requirements). Plus, support for diagnosing XML problems is far weaker than support for Java problems.
Dependency injection is more suited to larger programs. Most of the time the additional complexity is not worth it.
Often Spring is used in case you "might want to change the implementation later". There are other ways of achieving this without the complexity of Spring IoC.
For web applications (Java EE WARs) the Spring context is effectively bound at compile time (unless you want operators to grub around the context in the exploded war). You can make Spring use property files, but with servlets property files will need to be at a pre-determined location, which means you can't deploy multiple servlets of the same time on the same box. You can use Spring with JNDI to change properties at servlet startup time, but if you are using JNDI for administrator-modifiable parameters the need for Spring itself lessens (since JNDI is effectively a Service Locator).
With Spring you can lose program Control if Spring is dispatching to your methods. This is convenient and works for many types of applications, but not all. You may need to control program flow when you need to create tasks (threads etc) during initialization or need modifiable resources that Spring didn't know about when the content was bound to your WAR.
Spring is very good for transaction management and has some advantages. It is just that IoC can be over-engineering in many situations and introduce unwarranted complexity for maintainers. Do not automatically use IoC without thinking of ways of not using it first.
It's true that including the class in application-context.xml avoids the need to use getBean. However, even that is actually unnecessary. If you are writing a standalone application and you DON'T want to include your driver class in application-context.xml, you can use the following code to have Spring autowire the driver's dependencies:
public class AutowireThisDriver {
private MySpringBean mySpringBean;
public static void main(String[] args) {
AutowireThisDriver atd = new AutowireThisDriver(); //get instance
ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
"/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml"); //get Spring context
//the magic: auto-wire the instance with all its dependencies:
ctx.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().autowireBeanProperties(atd,
AutowireCapableBeanFactory.AUTOWIRE_BY_TYPE, true);
// code that uses mySpringBean ...
mySpringBean.doStuff() // no need to instantiate - thanks to Spring
}
public void setMySpringBean(MySpringBean bean) {
this.mySpringBean = bean;
}
}
I've needed to do this a couple of times when I have some sort of standalone class that needs to use some aspect of my app (eg for testing) but I don't want to include it in application-context because it is not actually part of the app. Note also that this avoids the need to look up the bean using a String name, which I've always thought was ugly.
One of the coolest benefits of using something like Spring is that you don't have to wire your objects together. Zeus's head splits open and your classes appear, fully formed with all of their dependencies created and wired-in, as needed. It's magical and fantastic.
The more you say ClassINeed classINeed = (ClassINeed)ApplicationContext.getBean("classINeed");, the less magic you're getting. Less code is almost always better. If your class really needed a ClassINeed bean, why didn't you just wire it in?
That said, something obviously needs to create the first object. There's nothing wrong with your main method acquiring a bean or two via getBean(), but you should avoid it because whenever you're using it, you're not really using all of the magic of Spring.
The motivation is to write code that doesn't depend explicitly on Spring. That way, if you choose to switch containers, you don't have to rewrite any code.
Think of the container as something is invisible to your code, magically providing for its needs, without being asked.
Dependency injection is a counterpoint to the "service locator" pattern. If you are going to lookup dependencies by name, you might as well get rid of the DI container and use something like JNDI.
Using #Autowired or ApplicationContext.getBean() is really the same thing. In both ways you get the bean that is configured in your context and in both ways your code depends on spring.
The only thing you should avoid is instantiating your ApplicationContext. Do this only once! In other words, a line like
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("AppContext.xml");
should only be used once in your application.
One of Spring premises is avoid coupling. Define and use Interfaces, DI, AOP and avoid using ApplicationContext.getBean() :-)
One of the reasons is testability. Say you have this class:
interface HttpLoader {
String load(String url);
}
interface StringOutput {
void print(String txt);
}
#Component
class MyBean {
#Autowired
MyBean(HttpLoader loader, StringOutput out) {
out.print(loader.load("http://stackoverflow.com"));
}
}
How can you test this bean? E.g. like this:
class MyBeanTest {
public void creatingMyBean_writesStackoverflowPageToOutput() {
// setup
String stackOverflowHtml = "dummy";
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
// execution
new MyBean(Collections.singletonMap("https://stackoverflow.com", stackOverflowHtml)::get, result::append);
// evaluation
assertEquals(result.toString(), stackOverflowHtml);
}
}
Easy, right?
While you still depend on Spring (due to the annotations) you can remove you dependency on spring without changing any code (only the annotation definitions) and the test developer does not need to know anything about how spring works (maybe he should anyway, but it allows to review and test the code separately from what spring does).
It is still possible to do the same when using the ApplicationContext. However then you need to mock ApplicationContext which is a huge interface. You either need a dummy implementation or you can use a mocking framework such as Mockito:
#Component
class MyBean {
#Autowired
MyBean(ApplicationContext context) {
HttpLoader loader = context.getBean(HttpLoader.class);
StringOutput out = context.getBean(StringOutput.class);
out.print(loader.load("http://stackoverflow.com"));
}
}
class MyBeanTest {
public void creatingMyBean_writesStackoverflowPageToOutput() {
// setup
String stackOverflowHtml = "dummy";
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
ApplicationContext context = Mockito.mock(ApplicationContext.class);
Mockito.when(context.getBean(HttpLoader.class))
.thenReturn(Collections.singletonMap("https://stackoverflow.com", stackOverflowHtml)::get);
Mockito.when(context.getBean(StringOutput.class)).thenReturn(result::append);
// execution
new MyBean(context);
// evaluation
assertEquals(result.toString(), stackOverflowHtml);
}
}
This is quite a possibility, but I think most people would agree that the first option is more elegant and makes the test simpler.
The only option that is really a problem is this one:
#Component
class MyBean {
#Autowired
MyBean(StringOutput out) {
out.print(new HttpLoader().load("http://stackoverflow.com"));
}
}
Testing this requires huge efforts or your bean is going to attempt to connect to stackoverflow on each test. And as soon as you have a network failure (or the admins at stackoverflow block you due to excessive access rate) you will have randomly failing tests.
So as a conclusion I would not say that using the ApplicationContext directly is automatically wrong and should be avoided at all costs. However if there are better options (and there are in most cases), then use the better options.
The idea is that you rely on dependency injection (inversion of control, or IoC). That is, your components are configured with the components they need. These dependencies are injected (via the constructor or setters) - you don't get then yourself.
ApplicationContext.getBean() requires you to name a bean explicitly within your component. Instead, by using IoC, your configuration can determine what component will be used.
This allows you to rewire your application with different component implementations easily, or configure objects for testing in a straightforward fashion by providing mocked variants (e.g. a mocked DAO so you don't hit a database during testing)
Others have pointed to the general problem (and are valid answers), but I'll just offer one additional comment: it's not that you should NEVER do it, but rather that do it as little as possible.
Usually this means that it is done exactly once: during bootstrapping. And then it's just to access the "root" bean, through which other dependencies can be resolved. This can be reusable code, like base servlet (if developing web apps).
There is another time when using getBean makes sense. If you're reconfiguring a system that already exists, where the dependencies are not explicitly called out in spring context files. You can start the process by putting in calls to getBean, so that you don't have to wire it all up at once. This way you can slowly build up your spring configuration putting each piece in place over time and getting the bits lined up properly. The calls to getBean will eventually be replaced, but as you understand the structure of the code, or lack there of, you can start the process of wiring more and more beans and using fewer and fewer calls to getBean.
I've only found two situations where getBean() was required:
Others have mentioned using getBean() in main() to fetch the "main" bean for a standalone program.
Another use I have made of getBean() are in situations where an interactive user configuration determines the bean makeup for a particular situation. So that, for instance, part of the boot system loops through a database table using getBean() with a scope='prototype' bean definition and then setting additional properties. Presumably, there is a UI that adjusts the database table that would be friendlier than attempting to (re)write the application context XML.
however, there are still cases where you need the service locator pattern.
for example, i have a controller bean, this controller might have some default service beans, which can be dependency injected by configuration.
while there could also be many additional or new services this controller can invoke now or later, which then need the service locator to retrieve the service beans.
You should to use: ConfigurableApplicationContext instead of for ApplicationContext
I would like some suggestions and feedback on the best way to structure dependency injection for a system with the structure described below. I'm using Guice and thus would prefer solutions centered around it's annotation-based declarations, not XML-heavy Spring-style configuration.
Consider a set of similar objects, Ball, Box, and Tube, each dependent on a Logger, supplied via the constructor. (This might not be important, but all four classes happen to be singletons --- of the application, not Gang-of-Four, variety.)
A ToyChest class is responsible for creating and managing the three shape objects. ToyChest itself is not dependent on Logger, aside from creating the shape objects which are.
The ToyChest class is instantiated as an application singleton in a Main class.
I'm confused about the best way to construct the shapes in ToyChest. I either (1) need access to a Guice Injector instance already attached to a Module binding Logger to an implementation or (2) need to create a new Injector attached to the right Module.
(1) is accomplished by adding an #Inject Injector injectorfield to ToyChest, but this feels weird because ToyChest doesn't actually have any direct dependencies --- only those of the children it instantiates.
For (2), I'm not sure how to pass in the appropriate Module.
Am I on the right track? Is there a better way to structure this?
The answers to this question mention passing in a Provider instead of using the Injector directly, but I'm not sure how that is supposed to work.
EDIT:
Perhaps a more simple question is: when using Guice, where is the proper place to construct the shapes objects? ToyChest will do some configuration with them, but I suppose they could be constructed elsewhere. ToyChest (as the container managing them), and not Main, just seems to me like the appropriate place to construct them.
A proper way is to have guice construct your dependencies. That is create and configure.
In your situation you should have an injector constructed in the Main. From the injector you get ToyChest. When you obtain ToyChest through the injector its managed by guice and you can depend on it to supply all dependencies properly configured.
In your case you can inject Provider<Ball>, Provider<Box>, etc. in ToyChest and when needed just retrieve instance from the provider. ToyChest is not responsible for constructing the instance, just to use it. You can also check MapBinder if you have a plugin architecture.
So far everything is managed by guice, so the shapes can have their logger injected without the using class knowing about it.
If you have some runtime parameters that you want to pass to the newly created shape instances, you can use AssistedInject.
Just a hint: you are not required to use constructor injection, you can have injection on field or setter, which simplifies the constructor.
Im trying to unit test a class in some Java code that I've inherited.
Problem is that it derives from a class that is part of the company's application framwwork. Upon construction, the base class does all sorts of 'clever' stuff, initialising connections to all kinds of services that are needed at runtime.
But for unit testing purposes I dont need any of that. I just need to create an instance of the derived class and then I can excercise it. If any test specifically need part of the hierarchy I can mock them out.
So how do I break this dependency?
Inheritance can be so brittle.
Is inheritance a requirement? All that "clever" stuff that the base class is doing (e.g., establishing connections) are things that a dependency injection engine would normally be providing.
Your class sounds like it would be better off from both a testing and a runtime standpoint if you find a way to not inherit and get its dependencies satisfied by a DI engine. Possible?
So you have a base class and an extended class. See if you can refactor the extended class to no longer extend the base class, but use it instead. So where you first called parent::fooBar(), you now call this.baseInstance.fooBar(). This way, you can inject another baseInstance for test purposes.
If you really need to extend the base class to override something, extract the functionality to a third class and make the extended class a proxy. The extended class does nothing else than call methods on the third class. E.g.
protected fooBar() {
return this.realImplementation.fooBar();
}
This way, you can test the real implementation, without instantiating the base class.
We had a similar issue.Lots of framework level classes and dependencies. We solved it using DI
I agree with the others who suggest that dependency injection is the way to go in the long term. As a short term hack, you could try to introduce a "global" flag that disables the clever initialization code for testing.
While I was digging an issue in spring's sources, I found the following:
public abstract class RequestContextHolder {
private static final boolean jsfPresent =
ClassUtils.isPresent("javax.faces.context.FacesContext",
RequestContextHolder.class.getClassLoader());
and then in a method:
if (jsfPresent) {
attributes = FacesRequestAttributesFactory.getFacesRequestAttributes();
}
Where the factory is defined as :
/**
* Inner class to avoid hard-coded JSF dependency.
*/
private static class FacesRequestAttributesFactory
This works obviously, as the inner class is not 'touched' until it is required, and at that moment it is certain that JSF exists on the classpath.
Now, I wonder if this is a good approach to apply in a other cases. For example this method means a compile time dependency.
So, two questions:
are there any drawbacks to this approach, other than the compile time dependency
are there better ways to prevent explicit dependency on an API, while still using it.
The code in the question looks quite clean to me.
The only way I can think of to avoid compile time dependancy is to use reflection. Try and load the class by name, if present search for the method you are after.
Reflection sounds worse to me.
are there better ways to prevent
explicit dependency on an API, while
still using it.
Other than creating a wrapper API for the dependency, I don't think so. Creating a wrapper API works well enough when you're only using a small portion of the API.
If you only have a runtime-dependency (your program check the existence of the library and takes different code paths) you simply can code and deliver without the library. The compile-time dependency stays, but Java links the objects at runtime as needed.