I am developing a plugin for Intellij IDEA 2018.2+ which will provide some additional inspections.
I have already learnt that there is a plugin.xml file which is the "heart" of plugin and is responsible for main behaviour of plugin.
As I understand, to implement (for example) additional inspection behaviour we need to define inspectionToolProvider in plugin.xml and inherit InspectionToolProvider interface. The same structure is defined for other extensions - we need to define something in .xml and implement some interface.
What bothers me is that if I want to implement some more-or-less complex algorithm, it looks like I need to use lots of static methods and utility classes, because I haven't found a way to use DI (e.g. Spring one) during plugin development.
Some examples in Intellij IDEA SDK docs also show "helper" methods as static ones defined in utility classes.
So overall question: is there a way to use dependency injection during Intellij IDEA plugin development?
IntelliJ IDEA has its own dependency injection, managed by PicoContainer. It allows you to inject any component or service into the constructor of any component, service or extension created on the same or lower level (possible levels are application, project and module). To use it, you simply declare a constructor parameter of the corresponding type; you do not need to apply any extra annotations.
You can also start your own DI container (using Spring or any other framework) in your plugin, but then it will be your own responsibility to support the injection of core IntelliJ IDEA components.