Spring DI with different styles
Spring as a dependency injection (DI) framework allows us to define our application components' dependency tree in three different ways: XML Annotation Java Config I've written a simple app, bookstore, with the three styles and they're available in the following repository. You can take a look and see how each style would look like. It also has a version that uses no Spring beans for comparison. https://github.com/ryu1kn/spring--working-with-beans Different styles have different pros/cons. Spring lets you mix the styles; so you can change it as you go. Here is my observations on each style. XML-based configuration Pros Weak/loose coupling with Spring framework in your app code. Good for keeping the option of removing Spring later Class dependency information is centralised. Fine-grained control on the dependency definition. Changing only the dependency information doesn't require the recompilation of your app code. Cons Unless you have a good IDE ...