What is Inversion of Control?

Question

Inversion of Control (IoC) can be quite confusing when it is first encountered.

1. What is it?
2. Which problem does it solve?
3. When is it appropria

Answer 1

Inversion of Control is what you get when your program callbacks, e.g. like a gui program.

For example, in an old school menu, you might have:

print "enter your name"
read name
print "enter your address"
read address
etc...
store in database

thereby controlling the flow of user interaction.

In a GUI program or somesuch, instead we say:

when the user types in field a, store it in NAME
when the user types in field b, store it in ADDRESS
when the user clicks the save button, call StoreInDatabase

So now control is inverted... instead of the computer accepting user input in a fixed order, the user controls the order in which the data is entered, and when the data is saved in the database.

Basically, anything with an event loop, callbacks, or execute triggers falls into this category.