Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)

This principle states two essential things:

  1. High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.
  2. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend on abstractions.

This can be hard to understand at first, but if you’ve worked with AngularJS, you’ve seen an implementation of this principle in the form of Dependency Injection (DI). While they are not identical concepts, DIP keeps high-level modules from knowing the details of its low-level modules and setting them up. It can accomplish this through DI. A huge benefit of this is that it reduces the coupling between modules. Coupling is a very bad development pattern because it makes your code hard to refactor.

As stated previously, JavaScript doesn’t have interfaces so the abstractions that are depended upon are implicit contracts. That is to say, the methods and properties that an object/class exposes to another object/class. In the example below, the implicit contract is that any Request module for an InventoryTracker will have a requestItems method.

Bad:

class InventoryRequester {
  constructor() {
    this.REQ_METHODS = ["HTTP"];
  }

  requestItem(item) {
    // ...
  }
}

class InventoryTracker {
  constructor(items) {
    this.items = items;

    // BAD: We have created a dependency on a specific request implementation.
    // We should just have requestItems depend on a request method: `request`
    this.requester = new InventoryRequester();
  }

  requestItems() {
    this.items.forEach(item => {
      this.requester.requestItem(item);
    });
  }
}

const inventoryTracker = new InventoryTracker(["apples", "bananas"]);
inventoryTracker.requestItems();

Good:

class InventoryTracker {
  constructor(items, requester) {
    this.items = items;
    this.requester = requester;
  }

  requestItems() {
    this.items.forEach(item => {
      this.requester.requestItem(item);
    });
  }
}

class InventoryRequesterV1 {
  constructor() {
    this.REQ_METHODS = ["HTTP"];
  }

  requestItem(item) {
    // ...
  }
}

class InventoryRequesterV2 {
  constructor() {
    this.REQ_METHODS = ["WS"];
  }

  requestItem(item) {
    // ...
  }
}

// By constructing our dependencies externally and injecting them, we can easily
// substitute our request module for a fancy new one that uses WebSockets.
const inventoryTracker = new InventoryTracker(
  ["apples", "bananas"],
  new InventoryRequesterV2()
);
inventoryTracker.requestItems();