Huge thanks for pointing me to this. I have never heard of IOC (now it's more popularly called DI - Dependency Injection) before, but it sounds just like the thing I had in mind.
Comment on Re^2: OO Design question: configuration
now it's more popularly called DI - Dependency Injection
Yeah, I had it called that originally, the it grew into a larger "Inversion of Control" framework with the Proxy objects and such. However, once I started actually using it in practice, I found I had little need for the proxies, but by then it was too late to change the name.
Plus, IOC was better as a namespace name, whereas DI is just kinda ugly :)