Sunday, January 16, 2005
Bye Avalon ! Hello Spring !!
IoC is not a new concept, although it's only just made prime time in the J2EE community. There are alternative IoC containers: notably, Apache Avalon, PicoContainer and HiveMind. Avalon has never become particularly popular, although it is powerful and has a long history. Avalon is fairly heavyweight and complex, and seems more invasive than newer IoC solutions. PicoContainer is lightweight and emphasizes the expression of dependencies through constructors rather than JavaBean properties. Unlike Spring, its design allows the definition of only one object of each type (possibly a limitation resulting from its rejection of any metadata outside Java code). -- Rod Johnson
