Service & Factory Configuration

Slim, and Slender by inheritance, use Pimple as an IoC container. It is very powerful, but can be cumbersome to configure. Slender ConfigLoader helps to automate this process by allowing service and factory classes to be registered inside config files.

Services

Services are singleton class instances that are shared across an application. The are lazy-loaded; not created until the first time they are asked for.

Registering services from config files is easy, simply add them to the services block in the form $identifier=>$class

...
services:
    MyService: MyVendor/MyNamespace/MyService
    OtherService: MyVendor/MyNamespace/OtherServiceFactory

Once a service is registered, you can retrieve it using the $app IoC container:

/** @var $app Slender\App */
$myService = $app['MyService'];
$secondTime = $app['MyService'];
$myService === $secondTime; // TRUE

Factories

Factories work in pretty much the same way as Services, with the exception that each time a factory class is requested from the IoC container, a completely new instance is returned.

Registering services from config files is easy, simply add them to the factories block in the form $identifier=>$class

...
factories:
    NewObject: MyVendor/MyNamespace/MyObject

Once a service is registered, you can retrieve it using the $app IoC container:

/** @var $app Slender\App */
$myService = $app['NewObject'];
$secondTime = $app['NewObject'];
$myService === $secondTime; // FALSE

Service Factories

If a registered Service or Factory class implements Slender\FactoryInterface, the return value of the class' create() method will be used instead of the class itself.

This allows runtime configuration of service classes