Question

Is there any Spring 3 feature to execute some methods when the application starts for the first time? I know that I can do the trick of setting a method with @Scheduled annotation and it executes just after the startup, but then it will execute periodically.

Answer 1

If by “application startup” you mean “application context startup”, then yes, there are many ways to do this, the easiest (for singletons beans, anyway) being to annotate your method with @PostConstruct. Take a look at the link to see the other options, but in summary they are:

• Methods annotated with @PostConstruct
• afterPropertiesSet() as defined by the InitializingBean callback interface
• A custom configured init() method

Technically, these are hooks into the bean lifecycle, rather than the context lifecycle, but in 99% of cases, the two are equivalent.

If you need to hook specifically into the context startup/shutdown, then you can implement the Lifecycle interface instead, but that’s probably unnecessary.