Yesterday I read an interesting post on Chris Richardson’s blog about how to inject dependencies into domain objects when using the Spring Framework and Hibernate. This is a great feature because it allows you the option to create richer domain models and avoid the anemic domain model anti-pattern, which was coined by Martin Fowler and discussed at great lengths in Eric Evans’ book Domain Driven Design.

Unfortunately, this AspectJ-based solution discussed by Chris Richardson will not be officially supported until Spring Framework 2 is released (which should be soon). There are some other solutions (e.g. DependencyInjectionInterceptorFactoryBean, ServiceLocator lookups, passing dependencies as as parameters to service methods, etc) but, as Chris points out, these all have some undesirable drawbacks. …Continue reading » How to Inject Dependencies Into Domain Objects When Using the Spring Framework 1.x and Hibernate