Configuring beans using Java

Before Spring 3, you could only define beans using XML. Spring 3 introduced the @Configuration, @Bean, @import, and @DependsOn annotations to configure and define Spring beans using Java.

You have already learned about the @Configuration and @Bean annotations in the Defining a bean and its scope section. Now, you will explore how to use the @Import and @DependsOn annotations.

The @Import annotation is more useful when you develop an application without using autoconfiguration.

The @Import annotation

@Import is used for modularizing configurations when you have more than one configuration class. You can import the bean’s definitions from other configuration classes, and this is useful when you instantiate the context manually. Spring Boot uses auto-configuration, so you don’t need to use @Import. However, you would have to use @Import to modularize the configurations if you want to instantiate the context manually.

Let’...