Dependency Injection Frameworks - A Rant

Uncle Bob has a great post on dependency injection frameworks. I'm so glad he wrote that article. There is precious little out there (maybe this is the only article) about why the DI frameworks suck and why DI is great. To be clear DI by hand works very well. And if all you need to do is DI, rolling it by hand is just as good as using a framework. In fact it wasn't until recently that I even saw a point to DI frameworks at all.

The only argument about DI frameworks that ever made much sense to me was that DI frameworks are great if you want to run your application with different configurations. But when do you want different configurations? Seriously when? For me, the only time I've wanted different configurations is for testing. Not unit or automated testing, but testing in the sense of I want to run the app and I don't want to hit prod.

But why do you need a framework to do that? Maybe you have a different main method. Or maybe you have a properties file. But if all you need are different configurations, a DI framework is an expensive price to pay.

What are the costs? Besides needing to learn a new framework, the DI frameworks are like a cancer. Once you start using them they invade and don't stop invading. You start @Autowiring and @Inject-ing and soon your whole app is cluttered with that crap. Not to mention the XML configs or Guice modules floating around. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but why do I even want to invest the time to learn how to do it right? The benefits of using the frameworks seem so slim it's doesn't seem worth my time.

However, I did get convinced recently that using Spring DI was the correct choice for a web app I'm working on. Why? Because when Spring manages your objects it does some magic with transactions and sessions and it's all pretty convenient. I still hate it! And it feels wrong. And I believe you can get the magic without the DI. It's a question of how much do you want to fight against your framework. For my current project the answer was clear, not that much.

The only value I get out of using Spring's DI is the magic it does in the background. Their DI is total crap. If you don't need the magic, it's hard to understand why you need the framework.