@Resource vs @Autowired

Both @Autowired (or @Inject) and @Resource work equally well. But there is a conceptual difference or a difference in the meaning

• @Resource means get me a known resource by name. The name is extracted from the name of the annotated setter or field, or it is taken from the name-Parameter.
• @Inject or @Autowired try to wire in a suitable other component by type.

So, basically these are two quite distinct concepts. Unfortunately the Spring-Implementation of @Resource has a built-in fallback, which kicks in when resolution by-name fails. In this case, it falls back to the @Autowired-kind resolution by-type. While this fallback is convenient, IMHO it causes a lot of confusion, because people are unaware of the conceptual difference and tend to use @Resource for type-based autowiring.

In spring pre-3.0 it doesn't matter which one.

In spring 3.0 there's support for the standard (JSR-330) annotation @javax.inject.Inject - use it, with a combination of @Qualifier. Note that spring now also supports the @javax.inject.Qualifier meta-annotation:

@Qualifier
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface YourQualifier {}

So you can have

<bean class="com.pkg.SomeBean">
   <qualifier type="YourQualifier"/>
</bean>

or

@YourQualifier
@Component
public class SomeBean implements Foo { .. }

And then:

@Inject @YourQualifier private Foo foo;

This makes less use of String-names, which can be misspelled and are harder to maintain.

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As for the original question: both, without specifying any attributes of the annotation, perform injection by type. The difference is:

• @Resource allows you to specify a name of the injected bean
• @Autowired allows you to mark it as non-mandatory.

The primary difference is, @Autowired is a spring annotation. Whereas @Resource is specified by the JSR-250, as you pointed out yourself. So the latter is part of Java whereas the former is Spring specific.

Hence, you are right in suggesting that, in a sense. I found folks use @Autowired with @Qualifier because it is more powerful. Moving from some framework to some other is considered very unlikely, if not myth, especially in the case of Spring.