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Russell Walker:
Is Best Practice Actually Poor Practice? Dependency Injection, Type Hinting, and Uni
Apr 05, 2017 @ 18:26:03

Russell Walker has a post to his site sharing his thoughts defending dependency injection, type hinting and unit testing against some of the common objections.

I've recently been in discussion with a colleague who thinks that dependency injection (DI) is over-used and, in cases where the dependency is a concrete class, unnecessary (in the latter case, he advocates simply creating new objects on the fly).

[...] In my opinion, this line of thinking is misguided, but he sent through some links to pages that he felt supported his point of view (including Tony Marston's rant on DI, and the Laravel documentation about 'facades' - which are actually used as an alternative syntax for the service locator [anti-]pattern). I genuinely wanted to understand the reasoning behind his point of view, as it flies in the face of just about everything I have ever read regarding best practice in PHP development. After reading those resources he sent though, I began to notice some misconceptions about what unit testing actually is, as well as confusion about the difference between code that is "strongly typed" (usually good) and "tightly coupled" (usually bad), and also a tendency to blame the wrong thing when problems arise.

He then breaks the rest of the post down into a few of the common objections and makes an attempt to set the record straight:

  • Not All Automated Tests Are Unit Tests
  • Using Mocks to Test in Isolation
  • What, Never Ever Create Objects on the Fly?
  • What About Those Laravel Facades?
  • Hidden Dependencies and Other Dangers
  • Strongly Typed is not Tightly Coupled

He ends the post with "another reason" that there could be issues with developers dismissing best practices in their development - a misunderstanding of the principle and how to correctly implement it.

tagged: bestpractice dependencyinjection typehint unittest opinion

Link: http://russellscottwalker.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/is-best-practice-actually-poor-practice.html


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