Just found a reason to use Spring Framework's "Lookup Method Injection" feature. Our system had a parser bean that recently began to maintain state, and so could not be reused without remembering to reset the state. It seemed more pure and safer to simply instantiate a new parser on each use. Even though the parser was configured as a prototype Spring bean, it would only be instantiated once (for a given web user session), since its parent "loader" bean was a singleton. Lookup method injection allowed Spring to provide the loader with a new instance of the parser for each usage, and without creating Spring library dependencies.