Spring -> Factory Design Pattern / IOC/DI ?

[kri shan]

Spring Bean Container implements Factory Design pattern. but bean container supports IOC/DI. IOC/DI(injects object dependencies whenever it needs) is opposite of Factory design pattern. I do not understand whether Spring supports Factory Design pattern ?

[Mark Spritzler]

Yes, if you have a Factory class already you can register it as a bean using the factory-bean and factory-method attributes of the bean tag. If it is a Singleton, you just use the factory-method attribute.

Also Spring has a FactoryBean interface that internally Spring uses a lot to create objects for you. For instance the JndiObjectFactoryBean is a Factory that does JNDI lookups for you so you don't have to write all that boiler plate code. All you have to do is set the jndi name string property, and maybe set JNDI.properties, if looking up from a different JVM.

Hope that helps

Mark