Comparison

FactoryFX is a replacement for:

• manual dependency injection
  • Order independence
  • Uniform application structure
• framework dependency injection (guava, spring, dagger)
  • Programmatic java API over annotations API
  • Java first
  • Fast startup (no classpath scanning)
• JConsole MBeans (runtime data/structure changes)
  • Lifecycle support
  • Metadata for an end user presentable GUI (labels, validation)
  • Multi-user editing
• Property files (text,xml,json or yaml)
  • Change history
  • Change metadata (comment, user, date)
  • Complex validation
• master data in database
  • Real data encapsulation in java
  • Immutable business objects

Comparison to other dependency injection frameworks

To implement dependency injection we need 2 layers of code.

• the business logic which declares dependencies in the constructor
• factory code which instantiates the business logic objects and provides the dependencies

Most existing dependency injection frameworks try to automate the factory code. To achieve this, the frameworks usually scan the classpath, create a dependency graph and finally create the business object.

This approach has some disadvantages:

• A complete automation is not possible. You need additional information provided by annotations e.g to exclude classes/exclude from instantiation or polymorphism. Finally, you are coding in an annotation dsl instead of java.
• Annotations are not part of the type system and lack tooling
• Annotations are non-dynamic as the are part of the class metadata
• Classpath scanning and reflection cause confusing stack traces
• Slow startup

FactoryFX

As a replacement for annotations FactoryFX use a functional java api with factories. The user creates factories following a simple structure convention. The factories also provide the dependencies and lifecycle control.

The programmatic API has the following advantages:

Advantages:

• no reflection magic means easy to debug and no surprises at runtime
• validation at compile-time
• easy lifecycle control
• no annotation DSL must be learned