Inversion of control is a common design practise that has been used in various application areas. It gained popularity in the context of object-oriented application frameworks and designs based on abstract classes and interfaces. Recently, dependency injection techniques, especially in the context of lightweight containers such as Spring, have raised the attention for inversion of control again. However, inversion of control has not yet been described in its architectural dimension with a focus on layering architectures, and the pros and cons of the design decision for control inversion. In this paper, we present the inversion-of-control layer pattern which describes the design practise from an architectural point of view, rather than focusing on particular implementation techniques.

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