spring bean

A Spring IoC container manages one or more beans. These beans are created with the configuration metadata that you supply to the container, for example, in the form of XML <bean/> definitions.

Within the container itself, these bean definitions are represented as BeanDefinition objects, which contain (among other information) the following metadata:

• A package-qualified class name: typically the actual implementation class of the bean being defined.

• Bean behavioral configuration elements, which state how the bean should behave in the container (scope, lifecycle callbacks, and so forth).

• References to other beans that are needed for the bean to do its work; these references are also called collaborators or dependencies.

• Other configuration settings to set in the newly created object, for example, the number of connections to use in a bean that manages a connection pool, or the size limit of the pool.

This metadata translates to a set of properties that make up each bean definition.

Table 1. The bean definition

Property	Explained in…​
class	Instantiating beans
name	Naming beans
scope	Bean scopes
constructor arguments	Dependency Injection
properties	Dependency Injection
autowiring mode	Autowiring collaborators
lazy-initialization mode	Lazy-initialized beans
initialization method	Initialization callbacks
destruction method	Destruction callbacks