[dependency-injection] Dependency Injection vs Factory Pattern

The reason Dependency Injection (DI) and Factory Patterns are similar is because they are two implementations of Inversion of Control (IoC) which is a software architecture. Put simply they are two solutions to the same problem.

So to answer the question the main difference between the Factory pattern and DI is how the object reference is obtained. With dependency injection as the name implies the reference is injected or given to your code. With Factory pattern your code must request the reference so your code fetches the object. Both implementations remove or decouple the linkage between the code and the underlying class or type of the object reference being used by the code.

It's worth noting that Factory patterns (or indeed Abstract Factory patterns which are factories that return new factories that return object references) can be written to dynamically choose or link to the type or class of object being requested at run time. This makes them very similar (even more so than DI) to Service Locator pattern which is another implementation of the IoC.

The Factory design pattern is quite old (in terms of Software) and has been around for a while. Since the recent popularity of the architectural pattern IoC it is having a resurgence.

I guess when it comes to IoC design patterns: injectors be injecting, locators be locating and the factories have been refactored.

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