What is the difference between @Inject and @Autowi

Question

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 1

@Autowired annotation is defined in the Spring framework.

@Inject annotation is a standard annotation, which is defined in the standard "Dependency Injection for Java" (JSR-330). Spring (since the version 3.0) supports the generalized model of dependency injection which is defined in the standard JSR-330. (Google Guice frameworks and Picocontainer framework also support this model).

With @Inject can be injected the reference to the implementation of the Provider interface, which allows injecting the deferred references.

Annotations @Inject and @Autowired- is almost complete analogies. As well as @Autowired annotation, @Inject annotation can be used for automatic binding properties, methods, and constructors.

In contrast to @Autowired annotation, @Inject annotation has no required attribute. Therefore, if the dependencies will not be found - will be thrown an exception.

There are also differences in the clarifications of the binding properties. If there is ambiguity in the choice of components for the injection the @Named qualifier should be added. In a similar situation for @Autowired annotation will be added @Qualifier qualifier (JSR-330 defines it's own @Qualifier annotation and via this qualifier annotation @Named is defined).

Answer 2

Better use @Inject all the time. Because it is java configuration approach(provided by sun) which makes our application agnostic to the framework. So if you spring also your classes will work.

If you use @Autowired it will works only with spring because @Autowired is spring provided annotation.

Answer 3

@Inject has no 'required' attribute

Answer 4

Assuming here you're referring to the javax.inject.Inject annotations. @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 @Inject synonymously with their own @Autowired annotation.

So, to answer your question, @Autowired is Spring's own (legacy) annotation. @Inject is part of a new 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.