For standalone (non-Android) applications, what is everyone's preferred DI library?

# announcements

[nwh]

For standalone (non-Android) applications, what is everyone's preferred DI library?

[gildor]

I believe Dagger2 is still the best option if you need fast and most scalable solution

[Casey Brooks]

I prefer Guice, been using it for years. Less boilerplate and much easier to set up, and being a reflection-based lib makes it possible to use it for a simple plugin system. Only downside is that it has long startup times, but for long-running applications this is easy to ignore.

[gildor]

What kind boilerplate do you have in Dagger?

[gildor]

You also can use Dagger for plugins using multi binding

[gildor]

But I agree, reflection based can have some advantages, but still on scale annotation processing can give significant advantages about speed and compile-time checks

[Casey Brooks]

For boilerplate, Guice has no need for Components or anything like it, and the modules are a bit cleaner as well.

[Casey Brooks]

For plugins, you need to recompile the core in order to support a new module, which wouldn’t work in a framework setting. You can take your framework, a bunch of modules compiled elsewhere, and still get them to build a single graph entirely at runtime (perhaps through configuration files or classpath scanning to find these modules)

[Casey Brooks]

But I totally agree, the nature of reflection DI does mean you lose some performance and safety, but it is by no means a deal breaker IMO

[gildor]

But if you have only one scope for whole application and only constructor injections, you component will have one method. I agree, this is can be considered as boilerplate, but also it’s just more explicit

[gildor]

It depends of course, I agree

[Shawn]

fwiw I don’t use anything but constructor injection, field injection is scary stuff at times lol

[David Hamilton]

So... given the power of Kotlin's lazy, what are the advantages of a DI library over using lazy `val`s (singletons) and `fun`s (providers) in a custom Dependencies class?

[gildor]

Because DI has nothing related to lazy

[gildor]

And DI is not about singletons

[gildor]

lazy property for dependency creation is actually against DI rules. You should provide dependencies from outside, do not create them on the same class

[gildor]

Of course you can write Service Locator using delegate properties to request required dependencies, but again, this is dependency inversion but not DI

[gildor]

and has the main problem of service locator: class has hard dependency on service locator implementation

[David Hamilton]

Ahhh - I wasn't clear

[David Hamilton]

I mean create a Dependencies class with all the injectable resources as vals and inject one into the other into the lazy initialisers.
They're external and injectable

[gildor]

so every class that need any dependency now has hard dependency to Dependencies

[gildor]

which is also not really good solution, especially on big scale

[gildor]

it’s even worse that service locator

[David Hamilton]

Other way around

[gildor]

DI is:

class SomeClass(val dep1: SomeDep1, val dep2: SomeDep2)

or the same with method injection (which has a lot of problems, especially in Kotlin with nullability)

[gildor]

So you have inversion of control and class doesn’t have any hard dependencies to any Injector, ServiceLocator and so on

[gildor]

Other way around

could you show an example

[David Hamilton]

open class Dependencies() {
    open val serviceB: ServiceB by lazy {
        ServiceB( serviceA)
    }
    open val serviceA: ServiceA by lazy {
        ServiceA()
    }

[gildor]

Okay, where is dependency injection here?

[David Hamilton]

Sorry, more haste, less speed 😄

[David Hamilton]

Obvs ServiceA instance is lazily created when it needs to be injected into B, (or is used elsewhere)

[David Hamilton]

Class can easily be overridden by subclasses to inject test dependencies

[gildor]

This is manual dependency injection, yes

[gildor]

now add 10 more dependencies

[gildor]

and some graph of them

[David Hamilton]

Sure, but if I compare with my Guice definitions, it's hardly, if any, more complicated

[gildor]

But I agree, Kotlin simplifies manual dependency injection code a lot

[gildor]

yes, sorry, just now get your point, yes, this may be a valid approach of course, but mostly on relatively small scale

[gildor]

we use similar approach on one of our small projects

[gildor]

but looks that when this graph will grow it will be really hard to support it

[David Hamilton]

Yes, true

[gildor]

Sure, but if I compare with my Guice definitions, it’s hardly, if any, more complicated

If you use constructor with @Inject annotation and your modules mostly just maps interfaces to implementations (or even don’t do this) than Guice or Dagger will save a lot of boilerplate for you

[David Hamilton]

🤔 Maybe I missed a trick with Guice!
Checking...

[gildor]

Because main boilerplate in this case will be defining new dependencies in your Dependencies class, invoking constructors and passing dependencies, which completely eliminated by Guice reflections or Dagger code generations

[gildor]

Of course DI framework adds additional configuration overhead and on small scale this overhead can be higher than saved boilerplate

[gildor]

but if you have relatively big graph you save a lot of code, especially if you use mostly constructor injections with dependencies that exist on the same graph (which is should be you preferred way to work with dependencies)

[David Hamilton]

Ah, yes. I used the @Provides annotation in Guice, which yields a Module almost identical to that in the lazy example

[gildor]

Yes, @Provides significantly increase amount of code, but in most cases you actually can avoid this

[gildor]

even for complicated cases when you need dynamic parameter as dependency, it’s possible to use @AssistedInject for this

[David Hamilton]

IIRC, my main driver in using @Provides was to allow test contexts to override certain dependencies. Is that possible using @Inject?

[gildor]

But you can override test dependencies, but you need module for that

[gildor]

Because you can override @Inject dependency with @Provides dependency

[gildor]

Do you need this for some integration tests?

[gildor]

Also I’m not so familiar with Guice, but this is reflection, so you probably can just replace it on reflection level without actual updating of graph