The question was "what has reflection got to do with it". I've used reflection for dependency inversion, so I think that's what it's got to do with it.

If you can do dependency inversion without reflection, more power to you :-) We can't do classpath scanning in the project I'm working on because of the size of the classpath, and compile time configuration using direct imports would introduce cycles, so reflection it is for us, in one form or another.

void createAccount(ICustomer c) { ... } // No dependency to concrete Customer

class Customer implements ICustomer { ... } // Customer Class can be created after Account above

createAccount(new Customer()) // Use of both, with dependency injection

Scanning for classes dynamically using reflection has nothing to do with above. And you certainly don't need any xml or framework to do it either.