Brandon Savage takes another look at a popular design pattern - the registry pattern - and how he's changed his thinking on its use a bit on how (or if) it should be used in your applications.

Last July, I wrote about the registry pattern and some of its advantages. These advantages include the ability to access objects across different areas of your application, and the storage of objects for later retrieval. [...] For me, over the last few months, I've discovered two reasons why I advise against the Registry Pattern: first and foremost, it discourages unit testing, and secondly, it discourages good design.

He goes on to elaborate on why these to things could be so detrimental to your code including the problems it can cause in tests being a point of failure and that it can make you application sloppy by giving you an unpoliced "bucket" to drop things in without any context to where they fit in the site.

So what's his suggestion to replace this bit of functionality and make things both easy to test and simpler to keep structured? Dependency injection.