Overview

plexus-default-container is Plexus' inversion-of-control (IoC) container. It is composed of:

• its public API: the root class is org.codehaus.plexus.PlexusContainer,
• its default implementation: the root class is org.codehaus.plexus.DefaultPlexusContainer.

Default implementation reads configuration in XML files:

• multiple META-INF/plexus/components.xml files that declare components,
• one META-INF/plexus/plexus.xml file that can be used to configure the plexus container and runtime in addition to declaring components.

But it is not limited to these files: Plexus container is by nature very extensible, it can be configured programmatically too or extended to read configuration from any source. It is used for example in Maven 2 to read plugins configuration from META-INF/maven/plugin.xml and instanciate Mojos downloaded from Maven repositories.