Summary

In this chapter, we covered a lot of ground with both the Spring core and IoC in general. We showed you examples of the different types of IoC and presented a discussion of the pros and cons of using each mechanism in your applications. We looked at which IoC mechanisms Spring provides and when and when not to use each within your applications. While exploring IoC, we introduced the Spring BeanFactory, which is the core component for Spring's IoC capabilities, and more specifically, we focused on the XmlBeanFactory that allows external configuration of Spring using XML.

This chapter also introduced you to the basics of Spring's IoC feature set including setter injection, constructor injection, auto-wiring, and bean inheritance. In the discussion of configuration, we demonstrated how you can configure your bean properties with a wide variety of different values, including other beans, using the XmlBeanFactory.

This chapter only scratches the surface of Spring and Spring's IoC container. In the next chapter, we look at some IoC-related features specific to Spring, and we take a more detailed look at other functionality available in the Spring core.