» Fowler brands IoC “Dependency Injection” Blue Sky On Mars

Fowler brands IoC “Dependency Injection”

by Kevin Dangoor

Martin Fowler provides a good dissection of the current lightweight container hullabaloo. He’s promoting the term “Dependency Injection” over “Inversion of Control”, because IoC is a bit generic for the pattern. The article also contrasts Dependency Injection with the Service Locator pattern, and does a nice job of list the pros and cons of each approach.

For Dependency Injection, he ultimately sides with PicoContainer’s constructor injection approach, admitting that ThoughtWorks folks are involved in PicoContainer’s development. I agree with his reason, though: you can use your constructors to ensure that your objects are always valid, even upon initial creation.

Any decent-sized, loosely-coupled system is going to run into the types of issues solved by these patterns. This article is a nice treatment of the topic.

2 Responses to “Fowler brands IoC “Dependency Injection””

DeanG says:

January 14, 2004 at 6:03 pm

Heh.

When I first read “IoC” I pulled the other l/Ii/1 variable mistake and thought it was “Lines of Code”…but hopefully everyones forgotton about that metric by now.
Kevin says:

January 14, 2004 at 8:34 pm

That would be a scary thing indeed if all these folks on JavaBlogs were talking (excitedly, no less) about LOC. (Finally! A way to truly know how productive our programmers are, and how powerful our software is!)

I once joked that people should be graded on how few lines of code it takes to implement some functionality. (Just a joke!!! I know that to actually do such a thing would yield hideously unreadable and unmaintainable code!)