For those still grappling with the concept of dependency injection, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted an analogy that could help make the concept a bit more clear.

I've been working on a proposal for including service locators and dependency injection containers in Zend Framework 2.0, and one issue I've had is trying to explain the basic concept to developers unfamiliar with the concepts -- or with pre-conceptions that diverge from the use cases I'm proposing.

Using his wife as a sample sounding board, he came up with a restaurant-based analogy to help explain the concept - asking for certain pre-planned things but wanting customizations. He reminds developers that there's not much "magic" to DI. Things are all well defined from the outset and you only have to use it when you want.