Understanding Spring @Autowired usage

TL;DR

The @Autowired annotation spares you the need to do the wiring by yourself in the XML file (or any other way) and just finds for you what needs to be injected where and does that for you.

Full explanation

The @Autowired annotation allows you to skip configurations elsewhere of what to inject and just does it for you. Assuming your package is com.mycompany.movies you have to put this tag in your XML (application context file):

<context:component-scan base-package="com.mycompany.movies" />

This tag will do an auto-scanning. Assuming each class that has to become a bean is annotated with a correct annotation like @Component (for simple bean) or @Controller (for a servlet control) or @Repository (for DAO classes) and these classes are somewhere under the package com.mycompany.movies, Spring will find all of these and create a bean for each one. This is done in 2 scans of the classes – the first time it just searches for classes that need to become a bean and maps the injections it needs to be doing, and on the second scan it injects the beans. Of course, you can define your beans in the more traditional XML file or with an @Configuration class (or any combination of the three).

The @Autowired annotation tells Spring where an injection needs to occur. If you put it on a method setMovieFinder it understands (by the prefix set + the @Autowired annotation) that a bean needs to be injected. In the second scan, Spring searches for a bean of type MovieFinder, and if it finds such bean, it injects it to this method. If it finds two such beans you will get an Exception. To avoid the Exception, you can use the @Qualifier annotation and tell it which of the two beans to inject in the following manner:

@Qualifier("redBean")
class Red implements Color {
   // Class code here
}

@Qualifier("blueBean")
class Blue implements Color {
   // Class code here
}

Or if you prefer to declare the beans in your XML, it would look something like this:

<bean id="redBean" class="com.mycompany.movies.Red"/>

<bean id="blueBean" class="com.mycompany.movies.Blue"/>

In the @Autowired declaration, you need to also add the @Qualifier to tell which of the two color beans to inject:

@Autowired
@Qualifier("redBean")
public void setColor(Color color) {
  this.color = color;
}

If you don’t want to use two annotations (the @Autowired and @Qualifier) you can use @Resource to combine these two:

@Resource(name="redBean")
public void setColor(Color color) {
  this.color = color;
}

The @Resource (you can read some extra data about it in the first comment on this answer) spares you the use of two annotations and instead, you only use one.

I’ll just add two more comments:

1. Good practice would be to use @Inject instead of @Autowired because it is not Spring-specific and is part of the JSR-330 standard.
2. Another good practice would be to put the @Inject / @Autowired on a constructor instead of a method. If you put it on a constructor, you can validate that the injected beans are not null and fail fast when you try to start the application and avoid a NullPointerException when you need to actually use the bean.

Update: To complete the picture, I created a new question about the @Configuration class.