@warmuuh, thank you for your feedback. You definitely have legit points here, and I fully respect your decision. In my case, I’m leaning towards constructor-based injection for 2 reasons.

First, I have peers who are learning Java for the first time in my team. The constructor-based injection “feels” more natural to them compared to field-based injection, even though we, the more experienced Spring users, know it is mostly syntactic sugar (with minor differences). I agree it is definitely cleaner when using field-based injection, but even with constructor-based injection, it isn’t too bad. Think about it, if we are injecting 3 dependencies, with field-based injection, we have a total of 6 lines (3 lines for @Autowired and 3 lines for field declarations). With constructor-based injection, we usually have 3 lines more = 9 lines (3 lines for field declarations, 3 statement lines in the constructor, 1 line for constructor arguments, 1 line for @Autowired, and 1 line for closing curly brace).

Second, if I use field-based injection, I can’t set that field as final. I’m trying to make it a habit to always use final as much as possible and constructor-based injection allows me to do that. With Java 8 moving towards functional-styled programming, the principle of immutability is going to be the key. Thus, I want to get my mindset ready for that, even though my corporation is only beginning to switch to Java 7… duh.

I personally prefer using field-based @Autowired, because it adds less clutter to your code. If you have around 5 dependencies, you would have 5 fields only. If you then add the constructor or methods only for the injection to work, you basically add 10~15 lines of code that don’t have *any* additional information for the reader, they are just organizational *white noise*.