I have years of Java experience on Eclipse and now would like to get my feet wet with Spring. After read some tutorials I have such a question: is it easy (or even possible) to find classes/methods references in any IDE that supports Spring? By using Spring there should be no direct references among some classes, instead they are configured in xml files.
Even further: how to manage those xml files if my project gets large, say with thousands or hundreds classes? I mean perhaps it is easy to get lost among those complicated configuration files.
Spring is a dependency injection engine. This means that it injects instances of A into beans which are dependent on A. So if bean B has a dependency on A, it will have a field of type A, and Spring will initialize this field for you.
Finding the references is thus trivial: select one of A’s methods, choose “Call hierarchy”, and if B calls this method of A, Eclipse will find it. It’s not different from any other Java project not using Spring.
Regarding the size of the XML files, Spring also uses annotations to inject beans, so the XML file can be reduced to a minimum.