In the Java community there's been a rush of lightweight containers that help to assemble components from different projects into a cohesive application. Underlying these containers is a common pattern to how they perform the wiring, a concept they refer under the very generic name of "Inversion of Control". 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.

Every month we take a look around and select some of the most interesting web-development-related web-sites. We read articles, check out tools, analyze the advantages of new resources. Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 60 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in May/June 2007.

Getting Real Here are the 16 chapters and 91 essays that make up the book

DesignMyRoom is the easiest, most fun tool for designing interior spaces.

Social design is a subset of design that focuses on the social lives of users. It deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. In the early days of the Web, most sites were read-only, focused on providing information to a single person at a time. Then the Web became read/write, allowing people to save information but still mostly for them acting alone. Now, we're seeing a tremendous amount of social software that allows many people to collaborate and share what they're doing with others. Designing for this social world is social design, and that's what we're talking about here at Bokardo.

As a developer, time is your most valuable resource. These six tips on how to write maintainable code are guaranteed to save you time and frustration: one minute spent writing comments can save you an hour of anguish.