Why Another IoC Framework?
After a long period of watching or participating in the development of Apache’s Avalon framework, we formed a team to start what we believed to be a far simpler IoC design. One that considered the component contract more important that the container. When we set out to do this in 2003, there was nothing equivalent to PicoContainer (xContainer originally). XWork, that underpinned WebWork2 was a general/embeddable Setter Dependency Injection framework, but not well known. The Spring Framework started in the same timescale, and we were talking to its authors before Martin Fowlers Dependency Injection article. Later we discovered that Apache’s HiveMind also was in the same space.
