Comments on: Comparison between Guice, PicoContainer and Spring

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?

By: ???????????? ????????? ??? Inversion Of Control « Java Hellenic User Group

???????????? ????????? ??? Inversion Of Control « Java Hellenic User Group — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:26:40 +0000

[...] ?? Pico-container ????? ???? ??? ???? ??? ??? ???????????? XML configuration. ????? ??? ???? ??? ????? ????????. [...]

By: Luiz

Luiz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:21:53 +0000

Very interesting post mate!
Thaks a lot for you effort on this one.

By: Golfman

Golfman — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:06:24 +0000

There’s another lightweight, open source, dependency injection framework that bundles ORM independence avoiding locking your code into one particular transparent persistence engine. You can use Hibernate, JDO (JPOX, Kodo etc) plus if you use another writing a new plugin for it is only a 30 minute job.

All the config is in minimalist Java (not XML) so you’ll find out at compile time if things aren’t right

By: Massimo Lusetti

Massimo Lusetti — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:50:45 +0000

Besides any comment on what you wrote, I would like to ask you to look at Tapestry5 IoC:
http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry5/tapestry-ioc/

Maybe it’s better to look at
http://tapestry.formos.com/nightly/tapestry5/tapestry-ioc/
for the latest nightly docs from trunk.

It is still marked as alpha, but there are a lot of site/applications using it with success.

Ciao

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:02:28 +0000

Update: today I found out that e.g. renaming a class will rename it in Spring’s XML files, too. I’ve tested this with Eclipse 3.3 and Spring IDE 2.0.

By: Christian Schenk

Christian Schenk — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 09:09:45 +0000

That’s right: you could just leave the annotations in the code and probably nobody would care. You would have a compile-time dependency to Guice but that wouldn’t be too bad either.

By: Andre Piwoni

Andre Piwoni — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:21:27 +0000

I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. Spring introduces cumbersome XML files but is more transparent. Guice on the other hand is less cumbersome to use but is less transparent. Like you said, there is no need to remove annotations (rather easy task) when moving to new framework. I have implemented two plug-in frameworks using Spring and annotations (Microsoft CAB) and I prefer annotations.