Ralph Schindler: DI, DiC, & Service Locator Redux

In his latest post Ralph Schindler takes another look at the usefulness of Dependency Injection Containers and whether or not they're the right thing to use for your situation.

To DiC, or not to DiC: that has seemed to be the question in PHP for the last few years. Most people generally agree that injecting dependencies is the right thing to do. For those writing a framework, or any shared codebase where extensibility or the ability to grow the codebase is a core philosophical tenet, not injecting dependencies is doing a disservice to the project in the long run. So, as I've stated before, the question becomes how do we manage the added complexity that comes with practicing dependency injection?

He briefly covers two topics that are often confused - the concepts of a service locator and a true dependency injection container. He then talks about the more correct situations to use each of them, mentioning a few questions you can ask about your app to determine the best fit. To illustrate, he includes a simple example where he mixed the two - DIC for models and service location for the controllers.