Dependency Injection vs. Dependency Injection Container in PHP
If you’ve worked with some of the modern framework such as Laravel or Symfony, I’m sure you’ve come across this term called “Dependency Injection”. So, what is dependency injection anyway?
Dependency Injection (DI) is a design pattern used to implement IoC(Inversion of Control). It is rather a technique using which one object supplies the dependencies of another object.
In other words, a dependent class would receive its dependencies from outside the class, maybe while creating its object or some other ways.
For instance, let’s say we have two classes called PaypalApi and StripeApi as follows:
class PaypalApi
{
public function getPaymentDetails($customerId)
{
// calls Paypal webservice
}
}
class StripeApi
{
public function getPaymentDetails($customerId)
{
// calls Stripe webservice
}
}
And if you want to use one of these in your custom class, you can achieve it like this without using Dependency Injection
class CustomerPayments
{
public function getCustomerPaymentDetails($customer)
{
$paypalService = new PaypalApi();
return $paypalService->getPaymentDetails($customer->getId());
}
}
As you can see above, we want to use the PaypalApi in our class CustomerPayments. So, we instantiated the PaypalApi and consumed it likewise. But there’s a problem here. The CustomerPayments is now tightly coupled to its dependency PaypalApi and if we want to use something else, say StripeApi, we’ll need to rewrite the getCustomerPaymentDetails method, which is not a good practice and makes the CustomerPayments class unusable for reuse. This is where dependency injection comes into play. The above example can be rewritten using dependency injection as following.
class CustomerPayments
{
protected $paymentService;
public function __construct(PaymentService $paymentService)
{
$this->paymentService = $paymentService;
}
public function getCustomerPaymentDetails($customer)
{
return $this->paymentService->getPaymentDetails($customer->getId());
}
}
Here, we can now define services using an interface called PaymentService like so.
interface PaymentService
{
public function getPaymentDetails($address);
}
class PaypalApi implements PaymentService
{
public function getPaymentDetails($customerId);
{
// calls Paypal webservice
}
}
class StripeApi implements PaymentService
{
public function getPaymentDetails($customerId);
{
// calls Stripe webservice
}
}
Now, it is for the user of the CustomerPayments to decide which implementation to use. And it can be changed anytime, without having to rewrite the CustomerPayments.
The
CustomerPaymentsis no longer tightly coupled to its dependency.
What’s a DI Container then?
DI containers are often software libraries that provides Dependency Injection functionality and allows automating many of the tasks involved in Object Composition, Interception, and Lifetime Management. DI Containers are also known as Inversion of Control (IoC) Containers.
If you’ve noticed in the example above that, we were responsible in handling injecting dependencies to classes. A DI container as it’s definition suggests helps in reducing this overhead by analyzing a type’s constructor, without the need to having to specify each constructor argument manually.
PHP-DI is one such library which helps in achieving DI in your PHP projects by providing a DI container.
Instead of writing following:
$paymentService = new PaypalApi();
$customerPaymentsService = new CustomerPayments($paymentService);
Using PHP-DI, you can rewrite like so:
$container = new DI\Container();
$customerPaymentsService = $container->get('PaymentService');
And configure which PaymentService PHP-DI should automatically inject in CustomerPayments through configuration:
$container->set('PaymentService', \DI\create('PaypalApi'));
If you change your mind, there’s just one line of configuration to change now.
Behind the scenes, the container uses a technique called autowiring. Basically, it will scan the code using PHP’s reflection and see what are the parameters needed in the constructors and injects them accordingly.
Like this article?
Buy me a coffee
👋 Hi there! I'm Amit. I write articles about all things web development. You can become a sponsor on my blog to help me continue my writing journey and get your brand in front of thousands of eyes.
