picocontainer

A sharp little embedded container.

  by Michael Rimov

Disclaimer: While I certainly wasn't a founder of PicoContainer, I am a project comitter these days.

PicoContainer is a little Dependency Injection library that could probably be best described as a micro-kernel with which to base the rest of your application framework.

It has a few philosophies that are hard to find elsewhere:

-They aren't great fans of XML. (Although it is not prohibited).

-The job that ... [More] PicoContainer does is a convenience.... in fact, in your unit tests, you should not use PicoContainer at all to achieve your goals.

This makes PicoContainer about the only non-invasive dependency injection container available.

Version 2.0 does provide some Annotation capabilities to provide some Google Guice-Like injections, but this method is hardly required.

It does have a couple of downsides for the beginner:

-Documentation, while improving constantly, is usually a little sparse.

-Because the framework is so completely flexible, you can often solve a particular problem five different ways.

While these make it a harder learning curve than other frameworks, to me, the time spent learning it is highly worthwhile. [Less]

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