In this new post to his site Alejandro Celaya offers some advice on improving the dependency injection of your application with the help of the Zend Framework plugin managers. More specifically he talks about the AbstractPluginManager, a part of the ZendServiceManager package.

Generally it is a very bad practice to inject a service container into any object, but there are some situations where it could be even good, when certain conditions are met.

In one of the ZF2 mailing lists somebody asked which were these situations. I couldn't find the email, but the answers said that you can do it when the service container manages resources of the same type, and your object virtually depends on all of them. [...] If you have another object that needs to perform database connections, you don't want to inject all of the connection objects into it, you should rather inject the connection pool. That will reduce the number of dependencies of your object.

In this situation, the connection pool is some kind of service container, but injecting it has more benefits than disadvantages.

He shows how to use the AbstractPluginManager to achieve this goal, noting the existence of a validatePlugin method that can be used to ensure all necessary dependencies are available. He includes a real example of it in use, creating a simple "social plugin manager" that verifies that the plugin provided is either a closure or instance of FilterInterface.