[ProgClub list] What is IoC?

[John Elliot]

On 11/10/2011 3:57 AM, Stuart Laughlin wrote:
> 1: My favorite at the moment is by Martin Fowler at
> http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html.

Thanks for your explanation and links Stuart. I haven't read all your 
emails yet, but I will. I just wanted to throw in an off-the-cuff remark 
about this quote from Fowler:

"In this article I dig into how this pattern works, under the more 
specific name of "Dependency Injection", and contrast it with the 
Service Locator alternative. The choice between them is less important 
than the principle of separating configuration from use."

So it seems like the object of IoC is to separate configuration from 
use, and my knee-jerk reaction to that would be to use a factory. So 
from your example you would configure Notifier to use a factory to 
create its IMessageClient (which concretely might be a EmailSender) and 
if you want to configure Notifier some other way (for testing or 
improvement) then you could just create a different factory that created 
the new IMessageClient. In your testing code you'd configure a mock 
message client that just logged to the console or something like that, 
and in your production system you'd use a real IMessageClient 
implementation handed out by the factory.

So far I don't see what IoC buys me, but I'll keep reading.