Inversion of Control vs Dependency Injection

Question

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.

Answer 1

The Inversion-of-Control (IoC) pattern, is about providing any kind of callback (which "implements" and/or controls reaction), instead of acting ourself directly (in other words, inversion and/or redirecting control to external handler/controller).

For example, rather than having the application call the implementations provided by a library (also know as toolkit), a framework calls the implementations provided by the application.

The Dependency-Injection (DI) pattern is a more specific version of IoC pattern, where implementations are passed into an object through constructors/setters/service lookups, which the object will 'depend' on in order to behave correctly.

Every DI implementation can be considered IoC, but one should not call it IoC, because implementing Dependency-Injection is harder than callback (Don't lower your product's worth by using general term "IoC" instead).

IoC without using DI, for example would be the Template pattern because the implementation can only be changed through sub-classing.

DI frameworks are designed to make use of DI and can define interfaces (or Annotations in Java) to make it easy to pass in the implementations.

IoC containers are DI frameworks that can work outside of the programming language. In some you can configure which implementations to use in metadata files (e.g. XML) which are less invasive. With some you can do IoC that would normally be impossible like inject an implementation at pointcuts.

See also this Martin Fowler's article.