Comments on: Comparison between Guice, PicoContainer and Spring

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:54:06 +0000

Hello Vamshi Krishan Dachavaram,
sure, you may be right and Pico may be the right choice in some circumstances. Sometimes it just depends on the frameworks a certain team is used to and it doesn’t make much sense deciding which technology is used on each and every project. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s nice having a certain basic infrastructure to build applications and if these happen to be web applications you might always opt for Spring – or something else of course – so it gets easier switching between projects because all of them use the same foundation. Just a side note I just thought of.

By: Vamshi Krishan Dachavaram

Vamshi Krishan Dachavaram — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:35:25 +0000

First of all nice article Christian,I liked it.
Actually we were using the picocontainer as a DI in our project, so initially i was bit fiss regarding the usage of this open source rather than spring which was proven right.

but more i think about it it depends on where you really deploying the code, we do nt have an application server, we are hosting in our home grown servers and have the standalone appls,So i thought it would be pretty easy to hvae the simplest DI(Pico) rather than having the dependencies with the application servers to read up the configuration XML files.

More over ppl who liked to work on maps and doesnt like XML stuff can also chose pico.
and very important point is if you are only looking for DI rather than other feature where spring sup[ports you may go for PICO.

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:29:31 +0000

Hi EvilLurker,
thanks for proving me wrong – I’m always happy to learn how things really are Anyway, as I said earlier I must admit that this article just mentions PicoContainer but doesn’t cover it in much detail, my fault. If I ever find the time to write such a decent blog post again I’ll try to avoid issues like this one.

By: EvilLurker

EvilLurker — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:03:08 +0000

“but nobody – in my experience – seemed to use it and so I didn’t write about it in more detail”

A little googling shows that Atlassian JIRA and the IntelliJ IDE (JetBrains) use PicoContainer at their core.
Some open source products also use it like Sonar. I’m pretty sure that plenty other companies use it without necessarily feeling the necessity to brag about it. Mostly, PicoContainer has to be mentioned to developers when the products have a extensible/plugin architecture.

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:13:04 +0000

Hi SpringKoolaid,
first off, again, I’m sorry that I didn’t cover PicoContainer in more detail – maybe this article is just a comparison of Spring and Guice.
Second, I don’t know what Bryon really meant but I don’t agree with this short statement either. All DI frameworks have the one or the other advantage and of course some disadvantages when compared to each other. Choosing one of them really depends on the specific context since none of them is the ultimate solution.
I like your cynical conclusion regarding Spring because I’ve observed this behavior as well. Anyway, I use both – Spring and Guice – on a regular basis and if I can’t influence the decision which DI framework should be used for a project, I just use it and don’t bother telling the client that he’s made the wrong decision because most of the time the disadvantages aren’t that bad.

By: SpringKoolaid

SpringKoolaid — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:06:37 +0000

If Guice (or Pico) are “two steps backward” from Spring to avoid XML hell, then obviously Spring was moving in the wrong direction. (Of course I could have told you that when I first was learning Spring – suddenly Java is not good enough and we are “XML Programmers” – hah!)

I’m a little annoyed at how Pico is overlooked here too, yes perhaps the experience wasn’t there to judge, but then that should probably be stated a little more up front to be fair. Pico seems like a more flexible choice than Guice: you CAN use annotations if you want, but you don’t have to at all. That’s pretty nice I’d say. Lack of dependencies (and Spring BLOAT) is a no-brainer and is HUGE, not something to be casually pointed out as a minor plus. Guice is definitely an excellent choice but I think Pico (which I believe came first) has the edge, technically speaking.

I see no “massive trade off” in not using Spring. Spring has reached it’s peak in popularity and now lives off hype and brain-dead management who bought into it. Pico and Guice don’t *need* huge communities because they’re so much simpler to use. The only trade off in not using Spring is that you’ll lose your buzzword compliance rating and the fuzzy feeling people get when they hear it on job interviews.

By: Bryon Lape

Bryon Lape — Wed, 26 May 2010 03:42:49 +0000

Nice comparison, but Guice is not bleeding-edge. It is two steps backward to attempt to avoid the XML hell Spring creates. It is a massive trade-off.

By: Nathaniel Harward

Nathaniel Harward — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:36:13 +0000

Fair enough, I have only used it for personal projects myself so I can’t find any fault there However I am considering it as a serious option to replace Spring in a current “real” project (since we don’t actually make use of the extras that Spring brings and really only use the DI part of it); if I/we do I’ll post here with whatever experience I have.

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:53:57 +0000

Hi Nathaniel,

Why was PicoContainer dismissed with so little detail?

Two years ago when I wrote this post I had no experience with real projects which where using PicoContainer; this hasn’t changed since. I had a look at the available solutions and thought that PicoContainer was worth mentioning but nobody – in my experience – seemed to use it and so I didn’t write about it in more detail.

By: nharward

nharward — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:57:50 +0000

I’m a little disappointed at the treatment of PicoContainer in this comparison. I have not used Guice (my research in considering it led me here) so I can’t comment on it, but I recently had a *terrible* Spring experience which is leading me far, far away from XML and the maintenance it brings.

I used PicoContainer years ago when first exploring DI and for that it seems to me the purest and by far lightest of the bunch plus no code dependencies at all except for dealing with the container at the top level, which all of them have.

I was reading here to see why Guice was better than PicoContainer since after their tutorial it looked identical except that I would have to use annotations all over my code. Why was PicoContainer dismissed with so little detail?