needle

= Needle Dependency Injection Container

Needle is a Dependency Injection container, similar in goal to HiveMind[http://jakarta.apache.org/hivemind], Spring[http://www.springframework.org], and PicoContainer[http://www.picocontainer.org] (in the Java universe), but vastly different in implementation. It takes advantage of the dynamic features in Ruby, especially closures and +instance_eval+.

• Project page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/needle
• User Manual: http://needle.rubyforge.org
• API Documentation: http://needle.rubyforge.org/api
• Needle Wiki: http://needle.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

For an excellent overview of dependency injection, have a look at "Dependency Injection in Ruby" (link:files/doc/di-in-ruby_rdoc.html).

== Downloading

You may download Needle from Needle's RubyForge project, at http://rubyforge.org/projects/needle. Needle is distributed both as a RubyGem[http://rubygems.rubyforge.org], and as a Ruby library. It is also available from the RPA[http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org].

== Installation

Needle is distributed as a gem, which makes it extremely easy to download, install, and use. However, it requires that you have RubyGems[http://rubygems.rubyforge.org] installed, first.

Assuming you have RubyGems installed, all you have to do is:

gem --remote-install needle

This will install the latest version of Needle.

Needle is also distributed as a Ruby library. It's not as easy to install this way, but it works. Simply grab the latest Needle package from the website, untar it, and install it by typing:

ruby setup.rb

Or, if you want a little more control over the installation:

ruby setup.rb --help

This will show you the options that are available to you, and then you can do each stage of the installation manually:

ruby setup.rb config ruby setup.rb setup ruby setup.rb install

== Manual

For more information about Needle, such as an overview and tutorials, see the Needle manual at http://needle.rubyforge.org.

== Credits

Thanks go to:

• Matz, for creating Ruby in the first place.
• Jim Weirich, for his inspirational blog article "Dependency Injection in Ruby" (http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby/DependencyInjectionInRuby.rdoc) that formed the embryo of what Needle has eventually become.

== License

Needle is copyright (c) 2004 Jamis Buck. It is open-source software, and may be redistributed under the terms of the BSD or Ruby licenses. The texts of these licences are included in the Needle distribution, under the +doc+ subdirectory.

The Needle manual and all software used to build it are distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license. Distribute it and modify it all you want, but give me credit and distribute your changes under an identical license.