Spring Prototype Bean

By default, the Spring framework creates beans as singleton. However we can instruct it to create a different bean each time a request is made specifying the prototype mode. Another couple of ways are available, to create a bean for each request or session.

I have written a simple JUnit test to see the difference between prototype and singleton.

I have created two empty classes, both of them implementing the empty interface Scoping:

@Component
@Scope(ConfigurableBeanFactory.SCOPE_SINGLETON)
public class UniqueThing implements Scoping {
}

@Component
@Scope(ConfigurableBeanFactory.SCOPE_PROTOTYPE)
public class Notepad implements Scoping {
}

The SCOPE_SINGLETON scope is the default, so usually you won't see it explicitly set in production code. Here is just to remark its existence.
The class Notepad, marked with SCOPE_PROTOTYPE is the interesting stuff.

This is what normally happens with beans:

@Test
public void testSingleton() {
    UniqueThing thing1 = context.getBean(UniqueThing.class);
    UniqueThing thing2 = context.getBean(UniqueThing.class);
    assertSame(thing1, thing2);
}

When I get a bean - here I get them through the Spring application context - the same bean is returned.

But if the bean is marked as SCOPE_PROTOTYPE, we have a different behavior:

@Test
public void testPrototype() {
    Notepad notepad1 = context.getBean(Notepad.class);
    Notepad notepad2 = context.getBean(Notepad.class);
    assertNotSame(notepad1, notepad2);
}

Each bean is a newly created one!

Reference: Advanced wiring, from Spring in Action, Fourth Edition by Craig Walls. Chapter three, section four, Scoping beans.

I pushed the code I created on GitHub, see the scoping package and the associated JUnit test case.