An adapter-aware, non-intrusive dependency injection framework for Java

Abstract

In strongly typed Object-Oriented Programming languages, it is common to encounter type incompatibilities between separately developed software components one desires to compose. Using the Adapter pattern to overcome these type incompatibilities is only an option if changing the source code of the software components is feasible, as references from objects to other objects are oftentimes hard-coded. The concept of Dependency Injection (DI) is aimed at mitigating the issue of hard-coded references. However, current implementations of DI are intrusive in ways that component developers need to foresee future use cases. To increase the reusability of components we propose an approach and a tool to configure interoperations between components externally, without the need for intrusive code changes. This approach is based on a new dependency injection mechanism that is combined with the Adapter pattern. If necessary, the most appropriate adapter to inject is selected automatically, thereby making the specifications of dependency injection very flexible.

Instance pointcuts

“…In future work, we would also like to combine our Instance Pointcuts approach with our work on "An Adapter-Aware, NonIntrusive Dependency Injection Framework for Java" [20]. This framework can inject objects into target locations (e.g., instance fields) and at the same time adapt the objects should they not be type compatible with the target site.…”

Non-instrusive instance level software composition

“…A parser for Gluer (we use the gluer extension to denote Gluer specifications) is implemented in Clojure [Hic08], a Lisp dialect compiled for the JVM [RHB13]. One of the design goals was to have the DSL grammar to be easily extendible at compile-time, and even at runtime.…”