Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

IoC, aka dependency injection, is the current trend. The idea is simple: create your normal class, and rather than going and fetching things you might want (like datasources, factories, and so on), get them given to you instead. This greatly facilitates things like unit testing, because you've got a lot less dependencies to set up.

Struts uses Actions to drive an application. This describes a way to use dependency injection techniques with Struts.

It can be pretty useful to supply dependencies to domain objects that you're loading via Hibernate. This is where Hibernate Interceptors come into play.

Don Brown made a very good point about a gotcha with the IoC technique I demonstrated with Struts: it's potentially not threadsafe.

A little while back, I blogged about how static and singleton are not synonymous, and one of the things I mentioned in there was the concept of an "access pattern". This is a term I've been kicking around for a while (in person, anyway... I think that was the first time I'd written about it), and I wanted to explore it a bit more here.

Turns out that, with Struts 1.1. at least, this can be a bad thing to do. Why? You lose the parameters on the request.