Grapht

Note

Grapht is no longer under active development. If you are interested in taking over the project, contact Michael Ekstrand.

Grapht is a light-weight dependency injector. It converts the dependency injection problem into a graph-based problem that can be solved and analyzed without constructing any components until a solution is guaranteed. The solution graph is also exposed to enable flexible extensions such as static analysis, and visualizations. Its design is discussed in our paper:

Michael D. Ekstrand and Michael Ludwig. 2016. Dependency Injection with Static Analysis and Context-Aware Policy. Journal of Object Technology 15(1) (February 1st, 2016), 1:1–31. DOI 10.5381/jot.2016.15.1.a1.

Grapht also supports specifying dependency bindings based on where in the graph the components must be injected. This allows a programmer to specify that a type Foo must be used in the context of type A, but a Bar should be used in any other context. This can be used to compliment the idea of qualifying injection points using annotations, as specified in JSR 330.

Grapht provides a fluent configuration API very similar to that of Guice's.

Maven

Grapht can be depended on from Maven's Central Repository by adding the following to the dependencies section in your POM:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.grouplens.grapht</groupId>
  <artifactId>grapht</artifactId>
  <version>0.6.0</version>
</dependency>

Legal

Grapht is released under the terms of the MIT license.

By submitting a pull request, you release your contribution to us under same license terms unless otherwise specified.

Release Notes

0.10.0

• Add @AliasFor to allow qualifiers to alias each other.

0.8.1

• Move Types.getDefaultClassLoader() to ClassLoaders.inferDefault()
• Add class loader context management

0.8.0

• Dependency graphs now use Dependency and Component types, instead of DesireChain and CachedSatisfaction, for greater forward flexibility.
• Support fixed desires (will not be rewritten)

0.7.0

See closed issues for more details.

• Enable regular expression matching for contexts (#83)
• Allow binding to satisfactions
• Refactor the reflection abstractions, dropping the SPI in favor of the reflect package.
• Use an immutable DAG instead of the old mutable Graph
• Support rewriting graphs using bind rules
• Make more use of Guava
• Support custom/arbitrary class loaders (typically the thread's context class loader)

0.6.0

See closed issues for more details.

• Added typed providers
• Add DependencySolverBuilder to make construction more obvious
• Make instance providers serializable

0.5.0

See closed issues for more details.

• Rewrite serialization logic to be more robust (#54)
• Return immutable views rather than copies of sets from Graph (#58)
• Be smarter about checking provider types (#35, #36)
• Add anchored context matchers (at matching) (#41)
• Improve diagnostic warnings and validity checking
• Rename Edge.getLabel() to getDesireChain()
• Change Graph.updateEdgeLabel to replaceEdge
• Remove Binding.finalBinding in favor of boolean parameter on to (#46)
• Add a visitor for satisfactions (#33)
• Add support for specifying default implementations and providers in properties files under the META-INF directory (#51)
• Module.bind is now called Module.configure
• Incompatible change: Changed default binding policy with respect to qualfier matching. Now, if you bind a type without specifying any qualifier, it defaults to binding unqualified dependencies and dependencies whose qualifiers are annotated with @AllowUnqualifiedMatch. To get the old behavior of matching irrespective of qualifier matcher, do bind(Type.class).withAnyQualifier() (or bindAny(Type.class)).

0.4.3

• Fix serialization of inner classes

0.4.2

• Fix serialization of primitive types in graphs

0.4.1

• Add DefaultNull annotation and support for it.

0.4.0

See closed issues for more details.

• Remove Parameter anotation
• Add basic thread safety for injectors
• Add more error detection
• Add convenience method to bind qualified types
• Allow explicit null bindings to be created

0.3.0

• Refactor SPI and bind rules to allow for more flexible binding functions. This brings the implementation much closer to the theoretical formulation presented in our paper.
• Implement Provider injection, including breaking dependency cycles with Provider injection.
• Pass the JSR 330 TCK.
• Simplify and clean up Graph API to no longer take type parameters.

0.2.1

• Rename getFunction() to build() in BindingFunctionBuilder.

0.2.0

• Make dependency graph solutions serializable using Java's serialization framework.
• Add CachePolicy lifecycle specification for instances (e.g. new, memoize, etc)
• Add support for generic attribute annotations on injection points that are carried through the solution graph.
• Add slf4j logging to grapht

0.1.0

• Initial published release of grapht
• Supports basic and context-aware dependency injection