According to the paper written by Martin Fowler, inversion of control is the principle where the control flow of a program is inverted: instead of the programmer controlling the flow of a program, the external sources (framework, services, other components) take control of it. It's like we plug something into something else. He mentioned an example about EJB 2.0:
For example the Session Bean interface
defines ejbRemove, ejbPassivate
(stored to secondary storage), and
ejbActivate (restored from passive
state). You don't get to control when
these methods are called, just what
they do. The container calls us, we
don't call it.
This leads to the difference between framework and library:
Inversion of Control is a key part of
what makes a framework different to a
library. A library is essentially a
set of functions that you can call,
these days usually organized into
classes. Each call does some work and
returns control to the client.
I think, the point of view that DI is IOC, means the dependency of an object is inverted: instead of it controlling its own dependencies, life cycle... something else does it for you. But, as you told me about DI by hands, DI is not necessarily IOC. We can still have DI and no IOC.
However, in this paper (from the pococapsule, another IOC Framework for C/C++), it suggests that because of IOC and DI, the IOC containers and DI frameworks are far more superior to J2EE, since J2EE mixes the framework code into the components, thus not making it Plain Old Java/C++ Object (POJO/POCO).
Inversion of Control Containers other than the Dependency Injection pattern (Archive link)
Additional reading to understand what's the problem with old Component-Based Development Framework, which leads to the second paper above: Why and what of Inversion of Control (Archive link)
My Question: What exactly is IOC and DI? I am confused. Based on pococapsule, IOC is something more significant than just inversion of the control between objects or programmers and frameworks.
Question&Answers:
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