What is a service provider?

Sorry if this is a silly question but I am a C developer who just happen to be in a meeting with a bunch of .NET guys and over heard their convers开发者_JAVA百科ation.

They were sketching out a design and constantly talk of service provider, services and spring. Instead of looking silly by asking them, I just decided to post here.

BTW, I am doing device driver development (have been for more than 10 years using C) and NEVER heard of service provider.

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If it was mentioned in the context of Spring, then most likely they were talking about the Service Locator Pattern.

The Service Locator is a concept in Dependency Injection frameworks; it's the "kernel" you can use to obtain abstract services of an arbitrary type. Usually with some code like this:

IMyService myService = locator.GetService<IMyService>();

In other words, it provides a special interface for components to gain access to an abstract service - usually an interface type - without knowing anything about the concrete type or how it's instantiated.