Idioms for the NetBeans Platform: Injectable Lookup Factory

With this article I'm starting a series of posts that will hopefully last for a few months, about a set of idioms (= technology-specific patterns) for the NetBeans Platform. All the things that I'll be talking about have been used during the development of blueMarine (and its new cousin blueOcean), some learnt or derived by others' work, a few as my original contribution. After almost three years of work with blueMarine on the NetBeans Platform they seem mature enough to be talked about and maybe useful for others; but of course I hope there will be discussions here as patterns and idioms need many different perspectives from the community for consolidating.

While I suppose that most of readers have at least a bit of knowledge about the NetBeans Platform, I'll try to write short introductions to put things in context; also because patterns/idioms are here also to help us in making better designs and I think that many concepts could be useful even outside the NetBeans Platform. Consider also that some parts of the NetBeans Platform can be used in regular applications as well (such in the case of the idiom I'm presenting today).

I'll use a really informal style here, while I'll later replicate the post contents to the NetBeans Wiki, with a more structured "pattern catalog" scheme and incorporating feedback and improvements.

There will be another related series of posts that I'll be starting on DZone soon - focused on how I designed one of the most important components of blueMarine - and, for the record, I've submitted related talk proposals to JavaOne and Jazoon 2009.

So, let's start with the Injectable Lookup Factory.