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Dependency Injection with Static Analysis and Context-Aware Policy
Journal article   Open access

Dependency Injection with Static Analysis and Context-Aware Policy

Michael D. Ekstrand and Michael Ludwig
Journal of object technology, v 15(1)
01 Jan 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5381/jot.2016.15.1.a1
url
https://doi.org/10.5381/jot.2016.15.1.a1View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Computer Science Computer Science, Software Engineering Science & Technology Technology
The dependency injection design pattern improves the configurability, testability, and maintainability of object-oriented applications by decoupling components from both the concrete implementations of their dependencies and the strategy employed to select those implementations. In recent years, a number of libraries have emerged that provide automated support for constructing and connecting dependency-injected objects. Our experience developing systems with these tools has led us to identify two shortcomings of existing dependency injection solutions: the mechanisms for specifying component implementations often make it difficult to write and configure systems of arbitrarily-composable components, and the toolkit implementations often provide limited capabilities for inspection and static analysis of the object graphs of dependency-injected systems. We present GRAPHT, an new dependency injection container for Java that addresses these issues by providing context-aware policy, allowing component implementation decisions to depend on where in the object graph a component is required, and using a design that allows for static analysis of configured object graphs. To achieve its objectives, GRAPHT is built on a mathematical representation of dependency injection and object graphs that facilitates static analysis and straightforward implementation, and forms a basis for further consideration of the capabilities of dependency injection. The mathematical representation includes context-aware policy that we show to be strictly more expressive than the qualified dependencies used in many current toolkits. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a case study showing how GRAPHT has aided in the development of the LENSKIT recommender systems toolkit.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Software Engineering
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