A Simple IOC Container

All of the SimpleDBM modules are designed with constructor based dependency injection in mind. But so far, these dependencies have been manually coded. I want to move away from manual setting up of dependencies and was therefore looking for a small IOC container that would serve my needs. Unfortunately, all the available dependency injection frameworks appear to be bloated and huge; PicoContainer used to be small, but now is  a 308k jar, SpringFramework with all dependencies is huge; Google Guice has an android edition that is 403k. Considering that SimpleDBM itself is about 632k in size, I don't fancy adding external libraries that cause the size to double or treble.

As my requirements are tiny (I only need support for singletons and constructor based dependency injection) I decided to roll out my own. The core of the IOC Container is implemented in just three files, consisting of less than 300 lines of code. Here are the links to these files:

• SimpleContainer.java - the IOC container
• Binding.java
• BindingBuilder.java

Of course it would be nice to reuse other libraries and not have to write my own, but on the plus side, you can't beat the home made solution when it comes to size. As I have also removed the dependency on Log4J, SimpleDBM is now totally self contained with no external dependencies other than the standard libraries that are shipped with JDK 5. I find this liberating.