What Is a Spring Bean?

1. Overview

Bean is a key concept of the Spring Framework. So understanding this notion is crucial to get the hang of the framework and use it in an effective way.

Unfortunately, there aren’t clear answers to the simple question of what a Spring bean really is. Some explanations go to such a low level that the big picture is missed, whereas others are too vague.

This tutorial will try to shed light on the topic, starting with a description in the official documentation.

2. Bean Definition

Here’s a definition of beans in the Spring Framework documentation:

In Spring, the objects that form the backbone of your application and that are managed by the Spring IoC container are called beans. A bean is an object that is instantiated, assembled, and otherwise managed by a Spring IoC container.

This definition is concise and gets to the point but fails to elaborate on an important element: the Spring IoC container. Let’s take a closer look to see what it is and the benefits it brings in.

3. Inversion of Control

Simply put, Inversion of Control (IoC) is a process in which an object defines its dependencies without creating them. This object delegates the job of constructing such dependencies to an IoC container.

Let’s start with the declaration of a couple of domain classes before diving into IoC.

3.1. Domain Classes

Assume we have a class declaration:

public class Company {
    private Address address;

    public Company(Address address) {
        this.address = address;
    }

    // getter, setter and other properties
}

This class needs a collaborator of type Address:

public class Address {
    private String street;
    private int number;

    public Address(String street, int number) {
        this.street = street;
        this.number = number;
    }

    // getters and setters
}

3.2. Traditional Approach

Normally, we create objects with their classes’ constructors:

Address address = new Address("High Street", 1000);
Company company = new Company(address);

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but wouldn’t it be nice to manage the dependencies in a better way?

Imagine an application with dozens or even hundreds of classes. Sometimes we want to share a single instance of a class across the whole application, other times we need a separate object for each use case, and so on.

Managing such a number of objects is nothing short of a nightmare. This is where inversion of control comes to the rescue.

Instead of constructing dependencies by itself, an object can retrieve its dependencies from an IoC container. All we need to do is to provide the container with appropriate configuration metadata.

3.3. Bean Configuration

First off, let’s decorate the Company class with the @Component annotation:

@Component
public class Company {
    // this body is the same as before
}

Here’s a configuration class supplying bean metadata to an IoC container:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = Company.class)
public class Config {
    @Bean
    public Address getAddress() {
        return new Address("High Street", 1000);
    }
}

The configuration class produces a bean of type Address. It also carries the @ComponentScan annotation, which instructs the container to look for beans in the package containing the Company class.

When a Spring IoC container constructs objects of those types, all the objects are called Spring beans, as they are managed by the IoC container.

3.4. IoC in Action

Since we defined beans in a configuration class, we’ll need an instance of the AnnotationConfigApplicationContext class to build up a container:

ApplicationContext context = new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(Config.class);

A quick test verifies the existence and the property values of our beans:

Company company = context.getBean("company", Company.class);
assertEquals("High Street", company.getAddress().getStreet());
assertEquals(1000, company.getAddress().getNumber());

The result proves that the IoC container has created and initialized beans correctly.

4. Conclusion

This article gave a brief description of Spring beans and their relationship with an IoC container.