Autowiring or setters?

[Gabi Teris]

Hi,

I got an advice from our architect saying to avoid autowiring and use setter injection. What do you think is best and why?
I see autowiring (if done properly, of course) a way to simplify code writing and better navigation within large projects.

Regards,
Gabi

[Joachim Rohde]

Gabi Teris wrote:
I see autowiring (if done properly, of course) a way to simplify code writing and better navigation within large projects.

Have you ever had to deal with a large project which was not familiar to you and where autowiring was used? Where do you see a better navigation when autowiring is used?
Yes, it saves a lot of typework. But in my experience it can get really ugly if it's not working as expected. Using setters is a bit more work but in my opionion it's the more maintainable approach.
And if you need to mention "if done properly, of course" (on any development issue) you can be sure: someone somewhere is doing right now the exact opposite (because of dead-lines, pressure, lack of sleep and/or knowledge, whatever).

[David O'Meara]

we were also having a discussion about @Autowire over here.

[Hauke Ingmar Schmidt]

I second that. Explicit wiring gives you tool support for navigating that is not possible with autowiring. Sure, you spare yourself a little typing but you don't get this for free. You loose tool support (STS, but there is experimental support, IIRC), readibility (I don't think less code automatically results in better readable code), bug avoiding (the earlier, the cheaper - autowiring moves some bug occurences to the run-time, the latest possible stage).

Could you explain why you think autowiring leads to "better navigation"?

[Gabi Teris]

Thanks for sharing your opinion!
Now I'm more than convinced not to use autowiring.

[Hauke Ingmar Schmidt]

There may be good reasons for using it; in my opinion it is just against the basic reason why to use Java: Find bugs early by supplying as much (type) information at compile time as possible. (It's certainly not about the language being great from an academic point of view.)

There are other approaches like "duck typing" (if it has a "quack" method then I will use it, without knowing about the type or intention). Dynamic languages are gaining poopularity recently. For me autowiring looks a lot like it. It's fine for itself, but combining the two leads to a loss at both ends. (Still have to write verbose Java, but bugs can still occur at late stages.)