[Grok-dev] Alternatives to Grok for Interface based dependency injection

Alec Munro alecmunro at gmail.com
Thu May 21 13:38:33 EDT 2009


Hi List,

(I believe this is known as a GBCW message, though I'm not sure what
that stands for)

After wrestling with Grok's installation on and off for the past 6
months, I have finally come to accept that it currently doesn't
provide us a compelling enough reason to accept that pain (and I got
real tired of troubleshooting when people would be unable to install
my software because of one of Grok's dependencies). Our primary use of
Grok is the adaptation mechanism, and we specifically use it as an
interface driven dependency injection tool. However, I realized today
that the way we had been doing that, with adapter lookups as needed,
often in the middle of other code, reduced our code clarity and
testability, by adding an additional dependency that was not easily
apparent to someone looking at initializer or method signatures.

So now I'm looking for an alternative dependency injection tool.
Ideally, one that would support dependencies based on interfaces. I've
looked at snake-guice a little bit, but not enough to be sure if it
already supports interfaces, or could easily be extended to support
them. Interfaces aren't a requirement, but they are definitely a
nicety from a design standpoint.

Thanks for all your help throughout the years, and I still have high
hopes that the promise inherent in the Component Architecture will
find an accessible way to express itself, but at least on Windows,
that seems to be a ways off.

Alec


More information about the Grok-dev mailing list