Google's Guice - Annotation-Driven Dependency Injection

Guice 3.0 has been released last month,it alleviates the need for factories and the use of new in your Java code. Think of Guice's @Inject as the new new. You will still need to write factories in some cases, but your code will not depend directly on them. Your code will be easier to change, unit test and reuse in other contexts.

Guice embraces Java's type safe nature, especially when it comes to features introduced in Java 5 such as generics and annotations. You might think of Guice as filling in missing features for core Java. Ideally, the language itself would provide most of the same features, but until such a language comes along, we have Guice.

Guice helps you design better APIs, and the Guice API itself sets a good example. Guice is not a kitchen sink. We justify each feature with at least three use cases. When in doubt, we leave it out. We build general functionality which enables you to extend Guice rather than adding every feature to the core framework.

Guice aims to make development and debugging easier and faster, not harder and slower. In that vein, Guice steers clear of surprises and magic. You should be able to understand code with or without tools, though tools can make things even easier. When errors do occur, Guice goes the extra mile to generate helpful messages.

For an introduction to Guice and a comparison to new and the factory pattern, see Bob Lee's video presentation. After that, check out our user's guide.
We've been running Guice in mission critical applications since 2006, and now you can, too.

New in 3.0

In InfoQ article, The most notable change to Guice 3.0 is the inclusion of a fully compliant JSR 330 injector. (JSR 330 was finalized in 2009.) In fact, “Guice 3.0 is the reference implementation for JSR 330,” according to Dhanji Prasanna of the Guice development team.

Because there is still a need to write factory code, Guice 3.0 adds assisted injection, which automatically generates factory implementations, alleviating the need to write boilerplate code. There are also new Binder methods and enhancements to injections that allow you to return bindings based either by type, scope, existing bindings or all. The framework also extends the SPI for elements to expose elements introduced by third-party extensions. Additional enhancements include improved OSGi support, numerous servlet extensions, support for singletons, and Struts 2 integration. Other features include:
* Simpler stack traces when AOP is involved
* Duplicate bindings are ignored rather than throwing an exception.
* Repackaged cglib, asm & guava classes are now hidden from IDE auto-imports
* Support for Maven

Guice vs. Spring

As is often mentioned in discussion groups the Spring framework already supports dependency injection. The most often voiced concern is that developers must choose between Guice and Spring. While Guice offers an alternative to Spring’s DI methods, it does not supplant the Spring framework. The truth is that Guice can coexist with Spring, and can be used independently or in conjunction with Spring. For example, Guice supports AOP method interceptors, allowing developers to use Spring’s transaction interceptor. There is also a SpringIntegration() class that makes it possible to bind to Spring beans. What Guice brings to the table is type safety, exception handling, and simplicity by removing both an abstraction layer and the need for XML configuration.

Finally it’s worth noting that "Guice 4.1" was just announced. The announcement is more of a footnote because 4.1 is a stripped-down "MiniGuice," suitable for very small applications. As Guice team member Sam Berlin puts it, "Guice 4.1 is a radical rethinking of Guice, dependency injection, and how java libraries are shipped." Guice 4.1 consists of a single file and can be called from this simple API:
myApp program = MiniGuice.inject(myApp.class, new Module1(), new Module2());*
 

The Guice 4.1 source file can be found at Google Code.