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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

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Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

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Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the most common Spring bean annotations used to define different types of beans.

There are several ways to configure beans in a Spring container. Firstly, we can declare them using XML configuration. We can also declare beans using the @Bean annotation in a configuration class.

Finally, we can mark the class with one of the annotations from the org.springframework.stereotype package, and leave the rest to component scanning.

2. Component Scanning

Spring can automatically scan a package for beans if component scanning is enabled.

@ComponentScan configures which packages to scan for classes with annotation configuration. We can specify the base package names directly with one of the basePackages or value arguments (value is an alias for basePackages):

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.baeldung.annotations")
class VehicleFactoryConfig {}

Also, we can point to classes in the base packages with the basePackageClasses argument:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = VehicleFactoryConfig.class)
class VehicleFactoryConfig {}

Both arguments are arrays so that we can provide multiple packages for each.

If no argument is specified, the scanning happens from the same package where the @ComponentScan annotated class is present.

@ComponentScan leverages the Java 8 repeating annotations feature, which means we can mark a class with it multiple times:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.baeldung.annotations")
@ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = VehicleFactoryConfig.class)
class VehicleFactoryConfig {}

Alternatively, we can use @ComponentScans to specify multiple @ComponentScan configurations:

@Configuration
@ComponentScans({ 
  @ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.baeldung.annotations"), 
  @ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = VehicleFactoryConfig.class)
})
class VehicleFactoryConfig {}

When using XML configuration, the configuring component scanning is just as easy:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.baeldung" />

3. @Component

@Component is a class level annotation. During the component scan, Spring Framework automatically detects classes annotated with @Component:

@Component
class CarUtility {
    // ...
}

By default, the bean instances of this class have the same name as the class name with a lowercase initial. In addition, we can specify a different name using the optional value argument of this annotation.

Since @Repository, @Service, @Configuration, and @Controller are all meta-annotations of @Component, they share the same bean naming behavior. Spring also automatically picks them up during the component scanning process.

4. @Repository

DAO or Repository classes usually represent the database access layer in an application, and should be annotated with @Repository:

@Repository
class VehicleRepository {
    // ...
}

One advantage of using this annotation is that it has automatic persistence exception translation enabled. When using a persistence framework, such as Hibernate, native exceptions thrown within classes annotated with @Repository will be automatically translated into subclasses of Spring’s DataAccessExeption.

To enable exception translation, we need to declare our own PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor bean:

@Bean
public PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor exceptionTranslation() {
    return new PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor();
}

Note that in most cases, Spring does the above step automatically.

Or via XML configuration:

<bean class=
  "org.springframework.dao.annotation.PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor"/>

5. @Service

The business logic of an application usually resides within the service layer, so we’ll use the @Service annotation to indicate that a class belongs to that layer:

@Service
public class VehicleService {
    // ...    
}

6. @Controller

@Controller is a class level annotation, which tells the Spring Framework that this class serves as a controller in Spring MVC:

@Controller
public class VehicleController {
    // ...
}

7. @Configuration

Configuration classes can contain bean definition methods annotated with @Bean:

@Configuration
class VehicleFactoryConfig {

    @Bean
    Engine engine() {
        return new Engine();
    }

}

8. Stereotype Annotations and AOP

When we use Spring stereotype annotations, it’s easy to create a pointcut that targets all classes that have a particular stereotype.

For instance, suppose we want to measure the execution time of methods from the DAO layer. We’ll create the following aspect (using AspectJ annotations), taking advantage of the @Repository stereotype:

@Aspect
@Component
public class PerformanceAspect {
    @Pointcut("within(@org.springframework.stereotype.Repository *)")
    public void repositoryClassMethods() {};

    @Around("repositoryClassMethods()")
    public Object measureMethodExecutionTime(ProceedingJoinPoint joinPoint) 
      throws Throwable {
        long start = System.nanoTime();
        Object returnValue = joinPoint.proceed();
        long end = System.nanoTime();
        String methodName = joinPoint.getSignature().getName();
        System.out.println(
          "Execution of " + methodName + " took " + 
          TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toMillis(end - start) + " ms");
        return returnValue;
    }
}

In this example, we created a pointcut that matches all the methods in classes annotated with @Repository. Then we used the @Around advice to target that pointcut, and determine the execution time of the intercepted methods calls.

Furthermore, using this approach, we can add logging, performance management, audit, and other behaviors to each application layer.

9. Conclusion

In this article, we examined the Spring stereotype annotations and discussed what type of semantics they each represent.

We also learned how to use component scanning to tell the container where to find annotated classes.

Finally, we learned how these annotations lead to a clean, layered design, and separation between the concerns of an application. They also make configuration smaller, as we no longer need to explicitly define beans manually.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
« Previous
Spring Data Annotations
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)