In Spring MVC, one can define interceptors that can perform work before and after a particular controller is invoked. This can be used, for example, to do logging, authentication etc.
The programmer who wishes to write a custom interceptor is supposed to implement the HandlerInterceptor interface. To aid this task, the HandlerInterceptorAdaptor abstract base class has been provided, which provides default implementations of all the methods specified in the interface. So, if just wants to do some pre processing, one can just extend HandlerInterceptorAdaptor and #Override public boolean preHandle(...), and not worry about implementing the postHandle function.
My doubt concerns the name. From what I understand of the Adapter pattern, it adapts syntactic impedance mismatches between interfaces.
Is that so? If yes, should the class providing the boilerplate implementations be called HandlerInterceptorDefaultImpl, or something along those lines?
Is there a different nomenclature/pattern for what is happening here?
Is the fact that we need a boilerplate class a code smell, and could be removed by refactoring the HandlerInterceptor interface into two: HandlerPreInterceptor and HandlerPostInterceptor? Or is that overkill?
From GOF book about the Adapter pattern:
Adapters vary in the amount of work they do to adapt Adaptee to the Target Interface. There is a spectrum of possible work, from simple interface conversion-for example,changing the names of operations-to supporting an entirely different set of operations. The amount of work Adapter does depends on how similar the Target interface is to Adaptee's.
The boilerplate class that you are referring to is called skeletal implementation class. This is mentioned in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. From the book:
You can combine the virtues of interfaces and abstract classes by providing an abstract skeletal implementation class to go with each nontrivial interface that you export. The interface still defines the type, but the skeletal implementation takes all of the work out of implementing it.
By convention, skeletal implementations are called AbstractInterface, where Interface is the name of the interface they implement. For example, the Collections Framework provides a skeletal implementation to go along with each main collection interface: AbstractCollection, AbstractSet, AbstractList, and
AbstractMap. Arguably it would have made sense to call them SkeletalCollection, SkeletalSet, SkeletalList, and SkeletalMap, but the Abstract convention is now firmly established.
Related
i have come across these comments in library of hamcrest matcher interface.
It is coded by Stevefreeman and Nat Pryce
Matcher implementations should NOT directly implement this interface.
* Instead, extend the {#link BaseMatcher} abstract class,
* which will ensure that the Matcher API can grow to support
* new features and remain compatible with all Matcher implementations.
What advantage would a abstract class i.e BaseMatcher implementing the matcher interface provide over the specialized class directly implementing matcher. If someone can explain with an example would help . i want to understand best practices for doing framework style code so I am curious to know when should one follow this pattern as i see similar style in Spring as well.
Let's say the Hamcrest designers decide to add a new method in the Matcher interface.
All the classes implementing Matcher directly wouldn't compile anymore.
But if they instead extend an abstract BaseMatcher class, the designers can add a default implementation of the new method in BaseMatcher, and all the existing subclasses would still compile.
Note that since Java 8, they could also add a default implementation directly in the interface. But Hamcrest was created long before Java 8.
What are the similarities & differences between traits, mixins and interfaces. I am trying to get a deeper understanding of these concepts but I don't know enough programming languages that implement these features to truly understand the similarities and differences.
For each of traits, mixins and interfaces
What is the problem being solved?
Is the definition of the concept consistent across programming languages?
What are the similarities between it and the others?
what are the differences between it and the others?
Every reference type in Java, except Object, derives from one single superclass.
By the way, Java classes may implement zero or more interfaces.
Generally speaking, an interface is a contract that describes the methods an implementing class is forced to have, though without directly providing an implementation.
In other words, a Java class is obliged to abide its contract and thus to give implementation to method signatures provided by the interfaces it declares to implement.
An interface constitutes a type. So you can pass parameters and have return values from methods declared as interface types, requiring that way that parameters and return types implement particular methods without necessarily providing a concrete implementation for them.
This sets the basis for several abstraction patterns, like, for example, dependency injection.
Scala, on its own, has traits. Traits give you all the features of Java interfaces, with the significant difference that they can contain method implementations and variables.
Traits are a smart way of implementing methods just once and - by means of that - distribute those methods into all the classes that extend the trait.
Like interfaces for Java classes, you can mix more than one trait into a Scala class.
Since I have no Ruby background, though, I'll point you to an excerpt from David Pollak's "Beginning Scala" (amazon link):
Ruby has mixins, which are collections of methods that can be mixed into any class. Because Ruby does not have static typing and there is no way to declare the types of method parameters, there’s no reasonable way to use mixins to define a contract like interfaces. Ruby mixins provide a mechanism for composing code into classes but not a mechanism for defining or enforcing parameter types.
Interfaces can do even more than is described in this post; as the topic can be vast, I suggest you to investigate more in each one of the three directions, while if you even have Java background, Scala and therefore traits are affordable to learn.
I'm learning MVP patter. In some examples, I saw this! Any one could demonstrate why programmers use this name convention?
Usually I is there to indicate an Interface. Without the I is it a class. Personally I am not a fan of this. I think it is more common in dot net. I havent seen it too much in Java
Reasons why I dislike:
IDEs now show icons that indicate whether a class is an interface or not.
If I want to change the interface to an abstract class I then have to rename the class
It hurts readability.
'I' stands for interface. It's a common naming convention to distinguish interfaces from classes / structures.
Interfaces are not classes - they define behaviour and classes provide implementation.
Read this article on MSDN for more info: Choosing Between Classes and Interfaces
An interface defines the signatures for a set of members that
implementers must provide. Interfaces cannot provide implementation
details for the members. For example, the ICollection interface
defines members related to working with collections. Every class that
implements the interface must supply the implementation details for
theses members. Classes can implement multiple interfaces.
It is an artifact from age when Hungarian notation was thought to be a good idea. It lets the user know that the name is for an interface.
Also, it is an extremely stupid practice.
Name of the interface should reflect what sort of contract between classes it signifies. It should not tell you to which class it has been tied to.
It should be class PDF extends Document implements Printable because it lets you know that class implements print() method for some reason (in a real world it would be actually a bad API design, but this is an example) instead of class PDF extends Document implements IDocument .. because this tell you nothing.
I'm trying to use TDD when writing a class that needs to parse an XML document. Let's say the class is called XMLParser, and its constructor takes in a string for the path to the XML file to parse. I would like to have a Load() method that tries to load this XML into memory, and performs a few checks on the file such as file system errors, whether or not its an XML file, etc.
My question is about alternatives: I've read that it's bad practice to have private methods that you need to test, and that you should be able to just test the public interface and let the private methods do their thing. But in this case, this functionality is pretty important, and I don't think it should be public.
Does anyone have good advice for a scenario like this?
I suggest to redesign your architecture a bit. Currently, you have one high level class with low level functionality embedded. Split that into multiple classes that belong to different layers (I use the term "layer" very loosely here).
Example:
Have one class with the public interface of your current class. (-> High level layer)
Have one class responsible for loading files from disk and handling IO errors (-> Low level layer)
Have one class responsible for validating XML documents (-> Inbetween)
Now you can test all three of these classes independently!
You will see that your high level class will do not much more than just composing the two lower level classes.
Use no access modifier (which is the next up to private) and write the test in the same package.
Good OOD is important but for really important functionality testing is more important. Good practices are always only a guideline and they are good in the general scenario.
You could also try to encapsulate that specific file-checking behaviour in another object and have your parser instantiate it and use it. This is probably what I would do. In this way you could also even use this functionality somewhere else with minimal effort.
You can make a subclass as part of your test package that exposes public accessors to the private methods (which should then be protected).
Public class TestableClass : MyClass
{
public someReturnType TestMethod() {
return base.PrivateMethod();
}
}
I'm not sure if I should create an abstract class and a series of descendants that inherit this abstract class, or define a protocol. What's the best practice in Cocoa?
It depends.
The abstract class + descendants pattern is known as a class cluster in Cocoa terminology. Well-known examples are NSString and NSArray. The main advantage of this approach is that you can implement methods on the base class that work in terms of a core set of methods and are inherited; for instance, a subclass of NSString only needs to implement -length and -characterAtIndex: for all public NSString instance methods to work (although it won’t be very efficient).
The downside of this pattern is that implementations must inherit from the base class, which can be a severe restriction in a single-inheritance language.
A protocol, on the other hand, can be adopted by any class, but can’t provide a base implementation. It’s a lot like a statically-checked version of duck typing; by adopting a protocol you claim you can quack, and by requiring a protocol you can restrict a parameter to quack-capable classes without requiring a specific base class.
If you’re planning to provide a standard set of implementations for your abstraction, you probably want a class cluster. If you want to communicate with an open set of objects implementing your abstraction, you probably want a protocol.
Allow me to recommend a book called Cocoa Design Patterns it is a very nice book to look up how the Cocoa framework works and what paradigms are used.
Cocoa Design Patterns on Amazon