In CDI you can define an object that will give you items of a certain type, using:
@Inject Instance<MyObject> myObjectInstance; //... MyObject myObjectInstance.get();
Similarly in Guice you can do:
@Inject Provider<MyObject> myObjectInstance; //... MyObject myObjectInstance.get();
I am wondering if there is a similar construct in Spring, or you must use the ApplicationContext in order to get the reference?
So after a lot of digging around I found out that Spring supports JSR-330. This JSR defines a simple API - the whole spec is literally just this API - that standardizes several dependency injection interfaces, annotations and behaviors.
Unlike Spring's FactoryBean the javax.inject.Provider interface doesn't throws Exception on getting the bean reference. Furthermore, you would still need to define this FactoryBean in some place (read XML, or @Configuration class, and this is suboptimal).
Due to a bug, in current Spring 3.1.1, the javax.inject.Provider does not work. It does work in Spring 3.1.0.
In order to use it you simple need to include the javax.inject jar - if you use maven you can:
<dependency>
<groupId>javax.inject</groupId>
<artifactId>javax.inject</artifactId>
<version>1</version>
</dependency>
Spring will detect it, and from that moment on you can simply:
@Inject
Provider<MyObject> myObjectInstance;
//...
MyObject myObjectInstance.get();
like in the Guice example, since it is the same API.
Despite my previous comment to Konstantin, Spring does create the Provider by itself. (I was testing it against Spring 3.1.1 and run into this Spring Provider regression issue)