I have been trying to understand spring beans. As per my understanding, by default all beans are singleton and a singleton bean with lazy-init property set to true is created when it is first requested and singleton bean with lazy-init property set to false is created when the application context is created.
So, in an application, when a user request comes in ( where each request is a separate thread), do all these threads share the same singleton beans when requested within the program/class?
Yes, if the bean is created with default scope, the bean is shared across threads. However, another scope can be used to achieve the behaviour you mentioned. See: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.0.M3/reference/html/ch04s04.html?
Yes, by default (scope == 'singleton'), all threads will share the same singleton bean. There are two other bean scopes, session and request, that may be what you're looking for. The request scope creates a bean instance for a single HTTP request while session scope maintains a unique bean for each HTTP Session.
For a list and description of all of the Spring bean scopes, check out: Spring bean scopes
The best way to understand this is to understand how @Autowired annotation works.
Or in other words to understand "Spring Dependency Injection".
You said, "
by default all beans are singleton
We use @Autowired when injecting one layer into another between two layers.
If exemplify: Suppose, I want to inject UserService UserController. UserService is a Singleton bean. Creates an instance from UserService and Stores its cache. When we want to inject this service with @Autowired annotation. This annotation brings the UserService stored in the cache.
In this way, Even if we do this inject operation in many classes.@Autowired inject an instance of UserService with singleton bean instead of dealing with one UserService at each time. It saves us a big burden.
This is the fundamental working logic of Spring Singleton Bean.
Also, Spring Ioc Container manages this whole process.
