Me ha vuelto a hablar JJ maravillas de Spring. He estado echanvo un vistazo a un artículo, sobre él, pero requiere mas tiempo del que tengo ahora. Es un poco espeso.
Me quedo con dos conceptos que mencionan:

• 'Inversion of Control' (IoC)
  
• 'Dependency Injection' (a flavour of IoC)

Con lo cual al buscar en google, lo primero que me ha salido es un artículo de Martin Fowler, Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern.

Mas info aquí.
Por lo visto Apache Excalibur lo usa.

La idea es del concepto es:

"That's the basic concept of Inversion of Control; you don't create your objects, you describe how they should be created. You don't directly connect your components and services together in code, you describe which services are needed by which components, and the container is responsible for hooking it all together. The container creates all the objects, wires them together by setting the necessary properties, and determines when methods are invoked."