IoC and dependency injection

I’m hearing and reading more and more about Inversion of Control (IoC) and dependency injection. The latter is basically the idea of programming only to interfaces, and not knarling up your code with factories to get concrete implementations of those, rather letting something outside of an object “inject” the implementations, prior to them being required. This injection can happen either through setter methods, or constructors. So its inverting control, hence IoC. The container controls which implementations an object gets, the object (class) is developed against interfaces. Wiring the whole lot up is an exercise for the container, based on some sort of (usually non-code based) configuration, like an XML file. IoC containers that are on my radar include Spring (not just a container btw), PicoContainer and HiveMind. Its a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it, the benefits become clear: code that is easier to evolve, everything is pluggable, and unit testing is a doddle – you can isolate units of code at a very granular level, stub everything else with test implementations (like your junit TestCase can implement all of a test targets dependencies and feed it exactly what it needs to prove some bit of functionality).