LightWire is a lightweight Dependency Injection engine for CFML that I wrote a while back and is being used by a number of developers and projects.

Many thanks to Micky Dionisio for finding and documenting a critical error in LightWire. I saw the posting yesterday, but didn’t get a chance to replicate the error and post a patch until this morning.

This posting clarifies what the error is and how to patch it.

Thanks Martin for catching the critical lack of a var scoping on a couple of variables in LightWire. While I've been using the unpatched version on over 40 projects without issue, under load (creating lots of transient objects) this could be a real problem, so please update your LightWire.cfc and BaseConfigObject.cfc either from the svn repo (or in svn go to http://svn.riaforge.org/lightwire) or by downloading the latest zip file.

The ColdBox team are aware of the issue, so you may see a separate patch directly from them. Both versions include the autowiring code added by Luis, so you should be able to use either version with Coldbox.

One of the many stories I didn't get a chance to mention recently was the great efforts by Aaron Roberson and Luis Majano. LightWire is now a supported DI engine in Coldbox.

Great work guys - many thanks!

One of the differentiators of LightWire is the concept of "mixin injection". It could more properly be called generic setter injection and the idea is to provide the benefits of setter injection (the ability to handle circular dependencies) without having to clutter up your classes with a bunch of setters that you're never actually supposed to call.

Paul has added a tag to allow you to describe your mixin injections using an XML config file. Check out his posting for more information.

Just a quick note that Paul Marcotte made some improvements and added some documentation regarding ColdSpring XML in LightWire. It only took me a month to finally get round to uploading - sorry Paul :-<

Available via svn or download at the project site.

As Nick just mentioned, the LightWire recording is now available online.

The presentation provided a brief intro to Dependency Injection, a short overview of ColdSpring and then ran through how to use LightWire and why you might consider it for some use cases.

If you're interested in why you might want to use a programmatic config file, "mixin injection" or "ghetto annotations", check it out. Good Q&A at the end, and as always, Joe had the last word (ColdSpring Forever *grin*).

Something I was getting really tired of in my framework was that every time I added a new feature (controller) or custom data type, not only did I need to write the CFC, but I also had to add the bean definition to my config file. With the programmatic config file in LightWire, I was able to write a script to automagically instantiate and inject all of the custom data types and features by looking at all of the CFC's in the appropriate directories . . .

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Just realized I hadn't made it at all obvious. The preso today at 2pm is online. Just click here just before 2pm EST if you'd like to attend!

This is a redo of last weeks which was marred by some technical glitches. Thanks to the CF Frameworks crew for putting this together.

Something else I'm going to be presenting today at 2pm EST in terms of the kinds of benefits you can get by using a Dependency Injection engine with a programmatic config file . . .

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I'm giving a presentation at 2pm EST today on LightWire. As part of that I decided to finally take a few minutes to mock up what a small part of my config file would actually look like if I did it in XML rather than programmatically . . .

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