You may well have heard of Dependency Injection—there’s a certain buzz around the term that has been moving through the ActionScript community for the last couple of years. It’s one of those terms that sounds like it must be really sophisticated and complex, but actually turns out to be a fancy name for a simple concept that you already understand how to use.

This doesn’t mean that it’s not powerful and interesting, but, as with most design patterns, it’s the neat capturing of an idea that many programmers encounter on their own into a single specific term—‘Dependency Injection’—that is most useful. You were probably already doing it; now you’ll have a more pithy way of referring to it.