Google Guice vs. PicoContainer for Dependency Injection

Question

My team is researching dependency injection frameworks and is trying to decide between using Google-Guice and PicoContainer.

We are looking for several things in our

Answer 1

The answer put up by jamie.mccrindle is actually pretty good, but I'm left confused why Spring is the default choice when it's pretty clear that superior alternatives (both Pico and Guice) are available. IMO Spring's popularity has reached it's peak and now it's currently living off the generated hype (along with all the other "me too" Spring sub projects looking to ride the Spring bandwagon).

Spring's only real advantage is community size (and quite frankly, due to the size and complexity, it's needed), but Pico and Guice don't need a huge community because their solution is much cleaner, more organized, and more elegant. Pico seems more flexible than Guice (you can use annotations in Pico, or not--it's extremely efficient). (Edit: Meant to say it's extremely flexible, not that it isn't also efficient.)

Pico's tiny size and lack of dependencies is a MAJOR win which shouldn't be understated. How many megs do you need to download to use Spring now? It's a kludgy-mess of huge jar files, with all it's dependencies. Intuitively thinking, such an efficient and "small" solution should scale and perform better than something like Spring. Is Spring's bloat really going to make it scale better? Is this bizarro world? I wouldn't make assumptions that Spring is "more scalable" until that's proven (and explained).

Sometimes creating something good (Pico/Guice) and then keeping your HANDS OFF of it instead of adding bloat and kitchen sink features with endless new versions really does work out...