README

Dice is a minimalist Dependency Injection Container for PHP with a focus on being lightweight and fast as well as requiring as little configuration as possible.

Project Goals

To be lightweight and not a huge library with dozens of files (Currently Dice is just 220-ish LOC in one file) yet support all features (and more) offered by much more complex containers
To "just work". Basic functionality should work with zero configuration
Where configuration is required, it should be as minimal and reusable as possible as well as easy to use.
Speed! (See the section on performance)

Installation

Just include the lightweight Dice.php in your project and it's usable without any further configuration:

Simple example:

<?php
class A {
	public $b;

	public function __construct(B $b) {
		$this->b = $b;
	}
}

class B {

}

require_once 'Dice.php';
$dice = new \Dice\Dice();

$a = $dice->create('A');

var_dump($a->b); //B object

?>

Full Documentation

For complete documentation please see the Dice PHP Dependency Injection container home page

PHP version compatibility

Dice is compatible with PHP5.4 and up.

Performance

Dice uses reflection, which is often wrongly labelled "slow". Reflection is considerably faster than loading and parsing a configuration file. There are a set of benchmarks here and here (To download the benchmark tool yourself see this repository) and Dice is faster than the others in most cases.

In the real world test (test 6) Dice is neck-and-neck with Pimple (which requires writing an awful lot of configuration code) and although Symfony\DependencyInjection is faster at creating objects, it has a larger overhead and you need to create over 500 objects on each page load until it becomes faster than Dice. The same is true of Phalcon, the overhead of loading the Phalcon extension means that unless you're creating well over a thousand objects per HTTP request, the overhead is not worthwhile.

Updates

14/08/2014

(garrettw) Made my fork focusing on code readability, simplicity, and optimization

28/06/2014

Greatly improved efficiency. Dice is now the fastest Dependency Injection Container for PHP!

06/06/2014

Added support for cyclic references ( https://github.com/TomBZombie/Dice/issues/7 ). Please note this is poor design but this fix will stop the infinite loop this design creates.

27/03/2014

Removed assign() method as this duplicated functionality available using $rule->shared
Removed $callback argument in $dice->create() as the only real use for this feature can be better achieved using $rule->shareInstances
Tidied up code, removing unused/undocumented features. Dice is now even more lightweight and faster.
Fixed a bug where when using $rule->call it would use the substitution rules from the constructor on each method called
Updated Dice documentation to use shorthand array syntax

01/03/2014

Added test cases for the Xml Loader and Loader Callback classes
Added a JSON loader + test case
Added all test cases to a test suite
Moved to PHP5.4 array syntax. A PHP5.3 compatible version is now available in the PHP5.3 branch.
Fixed an issue where using named instances would trigger the autoloader with an invalid class name every time a class was created

28/02/2014

Added basic namespace support. Documentation update will follow shortly. Also moved the XML loader into its own file, you'll need to include it separately if you're using it.
Please note: CHANGES ARE NOT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE. However they are easily fixed by doing the following find/replaces:

	new Dice => new \Dice\Dice
	new DiceInstance => new \Dice\Instance
	new DiceRule => new \Dice\Rule

garrettw / dice

Maintainers

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