Inversion of Containment

Update: Guy Nirpaz addresses the issue further. I'm in the middle of the USC/Michigan game and can't concentrate yet.

End

Guy Nirpaz talks about all the containers available for Java applications. Some are heavier than others. Some provide more lifecycle control than others. Co-workers have looked for several reasons at OSGi and JBoss' use of JMX/MBeans.

My Jini Goggles are on right now for related reasons. While Jini per se is not a "container" there are mechanism built in and on Jini that provide some lifecycle support. In-the-large: e.g. Rio. In-the-small: Leases. And the Jini mobile object mechanism is a kind of runtime "injection" mechanism with security.

What is a "container" and are there pieces of Jini that provide an "inversion of containment" to meet similar objectives? I'm just thinking. Do you need something like Spring to abstract Jini, when Jini itself is an abstraction of lookup, injection, etc.?