We've just published Michael Bar-Sinai's new article, The Match Maker Design Pattern - a New Place for the Actions. In this article, Michael tackles some of the problems associated with object-oriented design within the context of the changing requirements that the real-life business world imposes on software applications over time. To see what I mean, here's Michael's opening paragraph:
Software systems often deal with similar concepts, whose behavior differs only slightly. Classic Object-Oriented design deals with such cases using inheritance; overriding the calculateSalary() method in different Employee subclasses allows the rest of the application to remain oblivious to the subtle differences between the salary algorithms of Manager, Engineer, and AnnoyingCeoNephew.
In the article, Michael presents a solution that, while not a "silver bullet", provides benefits that work in a majority of real-life cases where you're updating software applications to address changed business requirements. His section "Dealing With New Classes On The Fly" opens with:
A MatchMaker instance does hold a Map mapping classes to handlers, but with a twist. When it is given an instance of a class for which a handler was not explicitly specified, it embarks on a breadth-first search (BFS) up the class hierarchy, starting from that object's class, looking for a class for which a handler was explicitly specified. A property of BFS is that it ensures that the class found is the closest one to the original object's class. Note that there might be a few classes with the same distance.
Figure 1. Class hierarchy and handlers example.
The article contains plenty of code snippets that illustrate the match maker technique. Michael concludes the article with this summary:
We have seen the Match Maker pattern, which allows programmers to:
add actions on objects without modifying the objects those actions operate on;
add objects and have appropriate actions automatically operate on them; and
work on a subclass while holding only a superclass reference to it, without downcasting.
We have seen two implementations, one simple yet not statically type safe, and one effectively type safe. Creating a full statically type safe solution is left as an exercise to the reader, providing the reader is looking for a subject for a PhD thesis.
I have used this this pattern in production code for analyzing emails, drawing tables, building UI, and handling JMS messages; I hope you'll find it useful too.
In the past two years I've managed the OpenESB open source project. This project is hosted on java.net. In this post I outline a number of tips and tricks I've learned while managing this project on java.net. This is useful information for my successor, but it also may be useful to other people who are managing projects on java.net. Web presence: An important factor in the success of an open source project is its web presence: it will be the first point of contact between a potential new user and the project. New visitors will want to see answers to these four items immediately...
Today's pattern is the Mediator pattern, used to handle complex communications between related objects, helping with decoupling of those objects. Mediator in the Real World: An airport control tower is an excellent example of the mediator pattern. The tower looks after who can take off and land - all communications are done from the airplane to control tower, rather than having plane-to-plane communication. This idea of a central controller is one of the key aspects to the mediator pattern...
The sample for developers creating multiview editors on the NetBeans Platform (described yesterday in this blog) is now slightly more extensive, since you can add new nodes in the visual view, which will then automatically be added to the source editor (as well as the visual editor, of course)...
As I wrote in my farewell note, I was working on starting a new company around Hudson. It took longer than I initially anticipated, but it's finally open for business! The company will provide two things; one is support, so that I can answer your questions and problem reports in a timely fashion, and the other is consulting, so that I can help you develop custom plugins, or provide on-site support to work on some tricky problems. The name of the company is InfraDNA because I think of Hudson more as an infrastructure on which all kinds of server-side automation/tools can be built/deployed, and because I think this stuff is built into me (as in DNA)...
In a well-organized build process, you want lightning-fast unit tests to run first, and provide whatever feedback they can very quickly. A nice way to do this is to be able to class your tests into different categories. For example, this can make it easier to distinguish between faster running unit tests, and slower tests such as integration, performance, load or acceptance tests. This feature exists in TestNG, but, until recently, not in JUnit. Indeed, this has been missing from the JUnit world for a long time...
In the Forums, kschaefe expresses his view in the SwingLabs forum on JXEditorPane honoring display properties: I believe that we should change the default construction of JXEditorPane to honor display properties. This means that when the font or colors are set the rendered documents will honor them. Core added this client property in 1.5, but left the old style...
In the Metro and JAXB forum, John Hite asks Where is databinding done?: I'm trying to figure out where metro converts SOAP messages to java objects. Is this done in a Tube? Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks, John
In the LWUIT forum, rgucci finds that Calling BlackBerry browser to play video blocks the whole device: Developing on the BlackBerry port, OSv5.0, Bold 9700 simulator. I am calling the native BlackBerry Browser to launch the BlackBerry media player to play an mp4 file stored in the SDCard. Everything works and plays, the video and sounds are...
NetBeans 6.9 Beta introduces the JavaFX Composer, a visual layout
tool for visually building JavaFX GUI applications, similar to the Swing
GUI builder for Java SE applications. Additional highlights include OSGi
interoperability for NetBeans Platform applications; support for JavaFX
SDK 1.3, PHP Zend framework, and Ruby on Rails 3.0; as well as
improvements to the Java Editor, Java Debugger, and issue tracking, and
more. NetBeans 6.9 Beta is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese,
Japanese and Simplified Chinese, as well as in several
community-translated languages. Learn more: http://netbeans.org
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