Question

In Spring 3.0.x documentation its mentioned that when you use other than setter/config method for dependency injection ie.Property or Constructor then it should be declared as private not public

Eg. class Abc

{

@Autowired
private Def def;     //DEF may be a class or an Interface.
...
....

}

but i was trying with Spring 2.5.5 and tried to make it Public and it worked…n i could not figure out why it worked though it must have behaved in weired sense like Exception thrown

I am a newbie with Spring Dependency and pls do tell me any resource other the spring’s website where i can get good examples to learn Spring DI

Answer 1

You mis-read the documentation. The page at the link you provided says:

Only one constructor (at max) of any given bean class may carry this annotation, indicating the constructor to autowire when used as a Spring bean. Such a constructor does not have to be public.

Fields are injected right after construction of a bean, before any config methods are invoked. Such a config field does not have to be public.

Config methods may have an arbitrary name and any number of arguments; each of those arguments will be autowired with a matching bean in the Spring container. Bean property setter methods are effectively just a special case of such a general config method. Such config methods do not have to be public.

At no point does it say " it should be declared as private not public". Indeed, the documentation doesn’t mention the word "private" at all.

In other words, Spring doesn’t care what the visibility of the constructor, method or field is.