Top Most Spring Interview Questions1

1) What is Spring?

Spring is a lightweight inversion of control and aspect-oriented container framework.

2)Explain Spring?

• Lightweight : Spring is lightweight when it comes to size and transparency. The basic version of spring framework is around 1MB. And the processing overhead is also very negligible.
• Inversion of control (IoC) : Loose coupling is achieved in spring using the technique Inversion of Control. The objects give their dependencies instead of creating or looking for dependent objects.
• Aspect oriented (AOP) : Spring supports Aspect oriented programming and enables cohesive development by separating application business logic from system services.
• Container : Spring contains and manages the life cycle and configuration of application objects.
• Framework : Spring provides most of the intra functionality leaving rest of the coding to the developer.

3) What are the advantages of Spring framework?

• The advantages of Spring are as follows:
• Spring has layered architecture. Use what you need and leave you don't need now.
• Spring Enables POJO Programming. There is no behind the scene magic here. POJO programming enables continuous integration and testability.
• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Simplifies JDBC
• Open source and no vendor lock-in.

4) What is the structure of Spring framework?

5) What are the different modules in Spring framework?

• The Core container module
• Application context module
• AOP module (Aspect Oriented Programming)
• JDBC abstraction and DAO module
• O/R mapping integration module (Object/Relational)
• Web module
• MVC framework module

6) What is IOC (or Dependency Injection)? 

The basic concept of the Inversion of Control pattern (also known as dependency injection) is that you do not create your objects but describe how they should be created. You don't directly connect your components and services together in code but describe which services are needed by which components in a configuration file. A container (in the case of the Spring framework, the IOC container) is then responsible for hooking it all up.

i.e., Applying IoC, objects are given their dependencies at creation time by some external entity that coordinates each object in the system. That is, dependencies are injected into objects. So, IoC means an inversion of responsibility with regard to how an object obtains references to collaborating objects.

7) What are the different types of IOC (dependency injection) ? 

      
     There are three types of dependency injection:

Constructor Injection (e.g. Pico container, Spring etc): Dependencies are provided as constructor parameters.

Setter Injection (e.g. Spring): Dependencies are assigned through JavaBeans properties (ex: setter methods).

Interface Injection (e.g. Avalon): Injection is done through an interface.

Note: Spring supports only Constructor and Setter Injection

8) What are the benefits of IOC (Dependency Injection)?

 

Benefits of IOC (Dependency Injection) are as follows:
Minimizes the amount of code in your application. With IOC containers you do not care about how services are created and how you get references to the ones you need. You can also easily add additional services by adding a new constructor or a setter method with little or no extra configuration.
Make your application more testable by not requiring any singletons or JNDI lookup mechanisms in your unit test cases. IOC containers make unit testing and switching implementations very easy by manually allowing you to inject your own objects into the object under test.
Loose coupling is promoted with minimal effort and least intrusive mechanism. The factory design pattern is more intrusive because components or services need to be requested explicitly whereas in IOC the dependency is injected into requesting piece of code. Also some containers promote the design to interfaces not to implementations design concept by encouraging managed objects to implement a well-defined service interface of your own.
IOC containers support eager instantiation and lazy loading of services. Containers also provide support for instantiation of managed objects, cyclical dependencies, life cycles management, and dependency resolution between managed objects etc.

9) What is the Core container module?

This module is provides the fundamental functionality of the spring framework. In this module BeanFactory is the heart of any spring-based application. The entire framework was built on the top of this module. This module makes the Spring container.

10) What is Application context module?

The Application context module makes spring a framework. This module extends the concept of BeanFactory, providing support for internationalization (I18N) messages, application lifecycle events, and validation. This module also supplies many enterprise services such JNDI access, EJB integration, remoting, and scheduling. It also provides support to other framework.