Inversion of Control

A design principle in which custom-written portions of a computer program receive the flow of control from a generic framework. In traditional programming, the custom code that expresses the purpose of the program calls into reusable libraries to take care of generic tasks, but with inversion of control, it is the framework that calls into the custom, or task-specific, code. In shorthand, it's a type of "don't call us, we'll call you."