Why inversion of control




















When using traditional dependencies, to test an object you have to create an environment where all of its dependencies exist and are reachable before you can test it. With DI, it's possible to test the object in isolation passing it mock objects for the ones you don't want or need to create.

Likewise, adding a class to a project is facilitated because the class is self-contained, so this avoids the "big hairball" that large projects often evolve into. The challenge of DI is writing an entire application using it. A few classes are no big deal, but a whole app is much more difficult. For entire applications, you frequently want a framework to manage the dependencies and the interactions between objects.

DI frameworks are often driven by XML files that help specify what to pass to whom and when. Andrew Binstock has reviewed hardware and software for InfoWorld for almost a decade. During that time, he was also the editor in chief of Dr. This container manages the creation and life-cycle of objects in the application.

IoC helps us create large systems by eradicating the responsibility of creating objects. Imagine this, suppose you have a bakery that specializes in making egg rolls. What is an egg roll without an egg? So eggs are essential in the making of egg rolls. Why egg rolls, you may ask? Well, you could call it plain nepotism. So how do we get a bakery that obeys the IoC principle? Well, rather than having a poultry farm and involving yourself with all the poultry-related tasks, you order the eggs and get them delivered to you.

With this new design, you can focus on making egg rolls, which results in a more effective baking process. This is the big idea behind IoC: separating concerns. Inversion of control makes it possible for a consumer to have more control over the software. It gives it more flexibility and freedom to choose from other options. Coupling is a measure of how closely bound software modules are to one another.

It is the degree to which changes made to a component force a need for a change in other components or modules. Tight coupling is when a change in component A requires a change in component B. Loose coupling means that components A and B are independent. Thus a change in component A would not affect B. Loose coupling is often a sign of testable, well-structured, maintainable, and readable software. Tight coupling leads to code fragility and code rigidity.

Code fragility is the likelihood that software will break in many places every time there is a change. When you call something abstract, it means that it is incomplete or not clearly defined. Abstraction is a programming approach that hides implementation details, revealing only the functionality relevant operations to the user.

It is one of the basic concepts in object-oriented programming. This principle states that every function, class, or module should have a single reason to change and have only one responsibility.

Making them easy to change and maintain. High-Level modules are modules written to solve problems and use cases. They are abstract and a map to the business domain business logic. Their concern is with what the software should do and not how they should do it.

Low-Level Modules are implementation details required to execute the business policies logic. They are the plumbing or internals of a system, and they tell us how the system software should do various tasks.

They tend to be very concrete. To make this code obey the DIP principle, extract the interface for the low-level modules. In the olden days, control was owned by the application first and the user second. If the application needed something from the user, it would stop and ask and then move on to its next task. The user's interaction provided mostly data rather than controlling what the application did next. This is a little foreign to us nowadays since we don't see this type of behavior very often.

If we switch that around and give the user primary control, then we have inverted the control. This means that instead of the user waiting around for the application to give it something to do, the application sits around waiting for user to give it something to do. GUI's are a great example of this and pretty much anything with an event loop has inverted control. Note that my example is on the top level and that this concept of inversion of control can be abstracted to different layers of control within the application i.

This may be why it is so hard to get a straight answer. In earlier days, apps used to generate command prompts to accept user inputs one after other. Today, UI frameworks instantiates various UI elements, loop through various events of those UI elements like mouse hover, click etc. So the main UI element flow "control" is moved from user program to UI framework. In earlier days, it was in user program.

Above code instantiating required class SqlCustRepo by main program logic is a traditional way and it does not achieves this goal of decoupling processCustomers from implementation of getAllCusts.

In inversion of control, the container instantiates the required implementation class as specified by, say xml configuration , injects it in the main program logic which gets bound as per hooks specified say by Autowired annotation or getBean method in spring framework. Above the container which is the spring framework has the responsibility to scan xml file, instantiate the bean of specific type and inject it into the user program.

User program have no control on which class is instantiated. PS: IoC is generic concept and is achieved in many ways. Above examples achieves it by dependency injection. Reference: Martin Fowler's article.

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Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 3 months ago. Active 1 year, 4 months ago. Viewed 53k times. Definitions Wikipedia inversion of control IoC is a programming technique, expressed here in terms of object-oriented programming, in which object coupling is bound at run time by an assembler object and is typically not known at compile time using static analysis.

Improve this question. Korey Hinton Korey Hinton 2, 3 3 gold badges 17 17 silver badges 30 30 bronze badges. Props for the person who can explain this in plain English. If a definition used the word it was defining, that would be a failure of a dictionary.

Similar logic applies here. As you can see above, class A uses Factory class to get an object of class B. Thus, we have inverted the dependent object creation from class A to Factory. Class A no longer creates an object of class B, instead it uses the factory class to get the object of class B.

In an object-oriented design, classes should be designed in a loosely coupled way. Loosely coupled means changes in one class should not force other classes to change, so the whole application can become maintainable and extensible.

Let's understand this by using typical n-tier architecture as depicted by the following figure:. In the typical n-tier architecture, the User Interface UI uses Service layer to retrieve or save data.

The Service layer uses the BusinessLogic class to apply business rules on the data. The BusinessLogic class depends on the DataAccess class which retrieves or saves the data to the underlying database. This is simple n-tier architecture design.

The following is an example of BusinessLogic and DataAccess classes for a customer. As you can see in the above example, the CustomerBusinessLogic class depends on the DataAccess class. It creates an object of the DataAccess class to get the customer data. It also creates an object of DataAccess class and manages the lifetime of the object. To solve all of the above problems and get a loosely coupled design, we can use the IoC and DIP principles together.

Remember, IoC is a principle, not a pattern. It just gives high-level design guidelines but does not give implementation details.



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