Autowired

TLDR

The @Autowired annotation spares you the need to do the wiring by yourself in the XML file (or any other way) and just finds for you what needs to be injected where and does that for you

Full Explanation

The @Autowired annotation allows you to skip configurations elsewhere of what to inject and just does it for you. Assuming your package is com.mycompany.movies you have to put this tag in your XML (application context file):

<context:component-scan base-package="com.mycompany.movies" />

Assuming each class that has to become a bean is annotated with a correct annotation like @Component (for simple bean) or @Controller (for a servlet control) or @Repository (for DAO classes) and these classes are somewhere under the package com.mycompany.movies, Spring will find all of these and create a bean for each one.

The @Autowired annotation tells Spring where an injection needs to occur. If you put it on a method setMovieFinder it understands (by the prefix set + the @Autowired annotation) that a bean needs to be injected. In the second scan, Spring searches for a bean of type MovieFinder, and if it finds such bean, it injects it to this method. If it finds two such beans you will get an Exception