Dependency injection, what is it and how does it work?

Disclaimer: Throughout this post we'll make references to the Spring framework. However, this post is not a Spring tutorial nor an explaination of how Spring works.

Dependency injection (DI) is, at its core, an implementation of the Inversion of Control (IoC) principle. Which simply means changing your classes from creating its own dependencies, to a solution where your classes just requests its dependencies.

Let's look at an example to better understand what we're talking about. Starting off with how classes are wired together in application without a DI framework;

In the example without a DI-framework you'll observe that Controller must have an understanding of how Service is created, and what dependencies Service needs. And in the case where the DAO class suddenly needs a second constructor argument it would require changes to all the classes in the example. We can however make the non-DI example a bit more future-proof by moving dependency instantiation to the Config class;

In small and simple applications this may be acceptable, as introducing a DI-framework also introduces complexity. But as the application grows this Config class may become rather large and hard to maintain. And we're interested in how DI-frameworks work, so let's continue by looking at an example using the fictional library DIY;

It should be noted that this is not the full story, and we'll take a look at what changes were made in order for DIY to understand how the classes should be wired together.

At its most basic you can think of DIY as a glorified Map, often referred to as the IoC Container. Populating the map can be achieved in several ways, but we'll focus on an annotation-based approach, e.g using @Bean, @Component, @Inject, etc. @Bean and @Component would be equivalent to map.put, whereas @Inject is equivalent to map.get.

To start we'll look at the lifecycle of DIY, which can be split into three distinct phases: 1. Scanning 2. Instantiation 3. Injection

Before anything can happen the library needs to get a concept of which classes the application needs. Spring supports a multitude of options here, but we'll focus on the simplest case; classpath-scanning searching for classes annotated with @Component and a default constructor. To help us in our efforts we'll use a nifty little library called reflections which will help us scan the classpath.

Finding all classes of interest is as simple as:

After finding all classes that the application needs we move on to instantiating these. Since we required all classes to have a default constructor we can simply call Class::newInstance for each of the classes found.

After instantiating all classes we're left with injecting dependencies where they are needed. All of the classes we found can potentially include fields annotated with @Inject, meaning they're dependent on another class. Hence we need to iterate through the list of beans and connect them together.

We iterate through all beans, finding all fields annotated with Inject and set their value. resolve can be implemented rather straight forward by just finding the first bean which can be assigned to the field-type.

At this point the DIY library has completed its job, and we should now be able to run DIY.get(Controller.class) and receive a instance of Controller with all fields populated by DIY.

We made a lot of assumptions and made a really scoped down version of what you may expect from a DI framework. Some of the issues include:

Having multiple beans of the same type. There is no way to differentiate between beans of similar types. Spring provides a way of naming your bean; @Bean(name = "my-awesome-controller"), and then requesting that specific bean by using @Named("my-awesome-controller") in addition to @Inject.

Code in the constructor of a bean. Strictly speaking you may create a default constructor and add some code there. But since the bean is instantiated before the injection-phase it will not have the resolved values at that point. Spring's solution comes in the form of the annotation @PostConstruct, which can be added to a method in the class and executed whenever Spring has injected the requested dependencies.

Constructor Injection. Some people prefer constructor injection instead of field injection. E.g allowing classes to specify a constructor with its dependencies instead of annotating every field. This is supported in Spring by simply annotating the constructor instead of each field in the class. For this to work the library needs to instantiate classes in topological order (hence circular dependencies will no longer work).

The @Bean annotation. We did not use the @Bean annotation in our library. Supplementing the scanning phase to support the annotation can be achieved by scanning for all classes including methods annotated by @Bean, instantiate the containing class, and invoking the annotated method.