On PHPBuilder.com Jason Gilmore has posted a new article looking at the benefits of dependency injection in helping you keep your code more maintainable and well-structured.

Of course, the advantages of object-orientation can only be fully exploited when implemented in conjunction with best practices such as encapsulation and inheritance. One such "implementational" best practice is dependency injection, a design pattern that facilitates the decoupling of otherwise dependent components. [...] Save yourself the trouble and decouple components using dependency injection.

He gives an example of how a simple dependency injection (DI) method on an "Account" class to take the database connection dependency out of the actual class and into an encapsulated object. This way, any sort of standardized database object can be passed in and acted upon. He also mentions two dependency injection containers you could use to help you implement it - Symfony's and Pimple.