Difference between Dependency Injection and Factory Pattern in Java

TL;DR Main difference between dependency injection and factory pattern is that in the case of former dependency is provided by the third party (framework or container) while in the case of later dependency is acquired by client class itself. Another key difference between them is that use of dependency injection result in loosely coupled design but the use of factory pattern create a tight coupling between factory and classes which are dependent on the product created by the factory. Though both Dependency Injection and Factory pattern look similar in a sense that both creates an instance of a class, and also promotes interface driven programming rather than hard coding implementation class; But, there are some subtle differences between Factory pattern and dependency injection pattern.

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