What is the difference between @Inject and @Autowired in Spring Framework? Which one to use under what condition?

java spring dependency-injection autowired inject
Rachel picture Rachel · Aug 22, 2011 · Viewed 299.8k times · Source

I am going through some blogs on SpringSource and in one of the blogs, author is using @Inject and I suppose he can also use @Autowired.

Here is the piece of code:

@Inject private CustomerOrderService customerOrderService;

I am not sure about the difference between @Inject and @Autowired and would appreciate it if someone explained their difference and which one to use under what situation?

Answer

pap picture pap · Aug 22, 2011

Assuming here you're referring to the javax.inject.Inject annotation. @Inject is part of the Java CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection) standard introduced in Java EE 6 (JSR-299), read more. Spring has chosen to support using the @Inject annotation synonymously with their own @Autowired annotation.

So, to answer your question, @Autowired is Spring's own annotation. @Inject is part of a Java technology called CDI that defines a standard for dependency injection similar to Spring. In a Spring application, the two annotations works the same way as Spring has decided to support some JSR-299 annotations in addition to their own.

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