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• Languages and VMs: Features that are hard to optimize and why

  - by mrjoltcola

  I'm doing a survey of features in preparation for a research project. Name a mainstream language or language feature that is hard to optimize, and why the feature is or isn't worth the price paid, or instead, just debunk my theories below with anecdotal evidence. Before anyone flags this as subjective, I am asking for specific examples of languages or features, and ideas for optimization of these features, or important features that I haven't considered. Also, any references to implementations that prove my theories right or wrong. Top on my list of hard to optimize features and my theories (some of my theories are untested and are based on thought experiments): 1) Runtime method overloading (aka multi-method dispatch or signature based dispatch). Is it hard to optimize when combined with features that allow runtime recompilation or method addition. Or is it just hard, anyway? Call site caching is a common optimization for many runtime systems, but multi-methods add additional complexity as well as making it less practical to inline methods. 2) Type morphing / variants (aka value based typing as opposed to variable based) Traditional optimizations simply cannot be applied when you don't know if the type of someting can change in a basic block. Combined with multi-methods, inlining must be done carefully if at all, and probably only for a given threshold of size of the callee. ie. it is easy to consider inlining simple property fetches (getters / setters) but inlining complex methods may result in code bloat. The other issue is I cannot just assign a variant to a register and JIT it to the native instructions because I have to carry around the type info, or every variable needs 2 registers instead of 1. On IA-32 this is inconvenient, even if improved with x64's extra registers. This is probably my favorite feature of dynamic languages, as it simplifies so many things from the programmer's perspective. 3) First class continuations - There are multiple ways to implement them, and I have done so in both of the most common approaches, one being stack copying and the other as implementing the runtime to use continuation passing style, cactus stacks, copy-on-write stack frames, and garbage collection. First class continuations have resource management issues, ie. we must save everything, in case the continuation is resumed, and I'm not aware if any languages support leaving a continuation with "intent" (ie. "I am not coming back here, so you may discard this copy of the world"). Having programmed in the threading model and the contination model, I know both can accomplish the same thing, but continuations' elegance imposes considerable complexity on the runtime and also may affect cache efficienty (locality of stack changes more with use of continuations and co-routines). The other issue is they just don't map to hardware. Optimizing continuations is optimizing for the less-common case, and as we know, the common case should be fast, and the less-common cases should be correct. 4) Pointer arithmetic and ability to mask pointers (storing in integers, etc.) Had to throw this in, but I could actually live without this quite easily. My feelings are that many of the high-level features, particularly in dynamic languages just don't map to hardware. Microprocessor implementations have billions of dollars of research behind the optimizations on the chip, yet the choice of language feature(s) may marginalize many of these features (features like caching, aliasing top of stack to register, instruction parallelism, return address buffers, loop buffers and branch prediction). Macro-applications of micro-features don't necessarily pan out like some developers like to think, and implementing many languages in a VM ends up mapping native ops into function calls (ie. the more dynamic a language is the more we must lookup/cache at runtime, nothing can be assumed, so our instruction mix is made up of a higher percentage of non-local branching than traditional, statically compiled code) and the only thing we can really JIT well is expression evaluation of non-dynamic types and operations on constant or immediate types. It is my gut feeling that bytecode virtual machines and JIT cores are perhaps not always justified for certain languages because of this. I welcome your answers.

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• Using free function as pseudo-constructors to exploit template parameter deduction

  - by Poita_

  Is it a common pattern/idiom to use free functions as pseudo-constructors to avoid having to explicitly specify template parameters? For example, everyone knows about std::make_pair, which uses its parameters to deduce the pair types: template <class A, class B> std::pair<A, B> make_pair(A a, B b) { return std::pair<A, B>(a, b); } // This allows you to call make_pair(1, 2), // instead of having to type pair<int, int>(1, 2) // as you can't get type deduction from the constructor. I find myself using this quite often, so I was just wondering if many other people use it, and if there is a name for this pattern?

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• How do I write this MySQL query?

  - by CT

  I am working on an Asset DB using a lamp stack. In this example consider the following 5 tables: asset, server, laptop, desktop, software All tables have a primary key of id, which is a unique asset id. Every object has all asset attributes and then depending on type of asset has additional attributes in the corresponding table. If the type is a server, desktop or laptop it also has items in the software table. Here are the table create statements: // connect to mysql server and database "asset_db" mysql_connect("localhost", "asset_db", "asset_db") or die(mysql_error()); mysql_select_db("asset_db") or die(mysql_error()); // create asset table mysql_query("CREATE TABLE asset( id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY, company VARCHAR(50), location VARCHAR(50), purchase_date VARCHAR(50), purchase_order VARCHAR(50), value VARCHAR(50), type VARCHAR(50), notes VARCHAR(200))") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Asset Table Created.</br />"; // create software table mysql_query("CREATE TABLE software( id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY, software VARCHAR(50), license VARCHAR(50))") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Software Table Created.</br />"; // create laptop table mysql_query("CREATE TABLE laptop( id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY, manufacturer VARCHAR(50), model VARCHAR(50), serial_number VARCHAR(50), esc VARCHAR(50), user VARCHAR(50), prev_user VARCHAR(50), warranty VARCHAR(50))") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Laptop Table Created.</br />"; // create desktop table mysql_query("CREATE TABLE desktop( id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY, manufacturer VARCHAR(50), model VARCHAR(50), serial_number VARCHAR(50), esc VARCHAR(50), user VARCHAR(50), prev_user VARCHAR(50), warranty VARCHAR(50))") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Desktop Table Created.</br />"; // create server table mysql_query("CREATE TABLE server( id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY, manufacturer VARCHAR(50), model VARCHAR(50), warranty VARCHAR(50))") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Server Table Created.</br />"; ?> How do I query the database so that if I search by id, I receive all related fields to that asset id? Thank you.

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• OOP - Handling Automated Instances of a Class - PHP

  - by dscher

  This is a topic that, as a beginner to PHP and programming, sort of perplexes me. I'm building a stockmarket website and want users to add their own stocks. I can clearly see the benefit of having each stock be a class instance with all the methods of a class. What I am stumped on is the best way to give that instance a name when I instantiate it. If I have: class Stock() { ....doing stuff..... } what is the best way to give my instances of it a name. Obviously I can write: $newStock = new Stock(); $newStock.getPrice(); or whatever, but if a user adds a stock via the app, where can the name of that instance come from? I guess that there is little harm in always creating a new child with $newStock = new Stock() and then storing that to the DB which leads me to my next question! What would be the best way to retrieve 20 user stocks(for example) into instances of class Stock()? Do I need to instantiate 20 new instances of class Stock() every time the user logs in or is there something I'm missing? I hope someone answers this and more important hope a bunch of people answer this and it somehow helps someone else who is having a hard time wrapping their head around what probably leads to a really elegant solution. Thanks guys!

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• Drop Shadow Center Column Website web page

  - by hagope

  How can I add a drop shadow effect to a website that has one center column? Some examples of what I mean: lala.com mint.com

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• How to show unread subforums?

  - by bilygates

  I have written a simple forum in PHP using PostgreSQL. The forum consists of a number of subforums (or categories, if you like) that contain topics. I have a table that stores when was the last time a user visited a topic. It's something like this: user_id, topic_id, timestamp. I can easily determine what topics should be marked as unread by comparing the timestamp of the last topic reply with the timestamp of the last user visit. My question is: how do I efficiently determine what subforums (categories) should be marked as unread? All I've come up with is this: every time a user visits a topic, update the visit timestamp and check if all the topics from the current subforum are read or unread. If they are all read, mark the subforum as read for the user. Else, mark it as unread. But I think there must be another way. Thank you in advance.

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• where does the professional sheen of a GUI application realistically come from?

  - by JW

  I have been playing around with php-gtk recently and in the past I have experimented with Java to make GUI 'hello world' apps. However both these types of applications have had a bit of a clunky (almost childish) look and feel to them. I cannot deny that they are handy for making apps for in-house use (and I totally respect the amount of community effort that goes into these projects). But I would not necessarily be proud to sell it as a commercial application with a price tag of, say, £450 or £1,000. If I wanted to make an application that had the look and feel of, say, Firefox for Windows, or Adobe xyz, what GUI/language should I use? Is the 'professional sheen' or smart look and feel down to the designer or is it the case that, no matter how good a designer is, picking the right GUI framework is essential to get that look?

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• How to decide which colors to use that look most similar across most screens/monitors?

  - by Lyon

  Hi, I'm baffled. I'm trying to find suitable colors for a logo that would look similar across most monitors/screens. I know it's near impossible, but how does one end up with the color palette that new Google logo and Facebook "blue" uses for example? I've a monitor that has been calibrated, and a few laptop screens that have default settings. Yet both the Google logo and facebook's look similar (although they aren't using colors restricted to the web safe 216 palette. Any ideas? thoughts? Thanks

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• Which source control paradigm and solution to embed in a custom editor application?

  - by Greg Harman

  I am building an application that manages a number of custom objects, which may be edited concurrently by multiple users (using different instances of the application). These objects have an underlying serialized representation, and my plan is to persist them (through my application UI) in an external source control system. Of course this implies that my application can check the current version of an object for updates, a merging interface for each object, etc. My question is what source control paradigm(s) and specific solution(s) to support and why. The way I (perhaps naively) see the source control world is three general paradigms: Single-repository, locked access (MS SourceSafe) Single-repository, concurrent access (CVS/SVN) Distributed (Mercurial, Git) I haven't heard of anyone using #1 for quite a number of years, so I am planning to disregard this case altogether (unless I get a compelling argument otherwise). However, I'm at a loss as to whether to support #2 or #3, and which specific implementations. I'm concerned that the use paradigms are subtly different enough that I can't adequately capture basic operations in a single UI. The last bit of information I should convey is that this application is intended to be deployed in a commercial setting, where a source control system may already be in use. I would prefer not to support more than one solution unless it's really a deal-breaker, so wide adoption in a corporate setting is a plus.

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• Using inheritance and polymorphism to solve a common game problem

  - by Barry Brown

  I have two classes; let's call them Ogre and Wizard. (All fields are public to make the example easier to type in.) public class Ogre { int weight; int height; int axeLength; } public class Wizard { int age; int IQ; int height; } In each class I can create a method called, say, battle() that will determine who will win if an Ogre meets and Ogre or a Wizard meets a Wizard. Here's an example. If an Ogre meets an Ogre, the heavier one wins. But if the weight is the same, the one with the longer axe wins. public Ogre battle(Ogre o) { if (this.height > o.height) return this; else if (this.height < o.height) return o; else if (this.axeLength > o.axeLength) return this; else if (this.axeLength < o.axeLength) return o; else return this; // default case } We can make a similar method for Wizards. But what if a Wizard meets an Ogre? We could of course make a method for that, comparing, say, just the heights. public Wizard battle(Ogre o) { if (this.height > o.height) return this; else if (this.height < o.height) return o; else return this; } And we'd make a similar one for Ogres that meet Wizard. But things get out of hand if we have to add more character types to the program. This is where I get stuck. One obvious solution is to create a Character class with the common traits. Ogre and Wizard inherit from the Character and extend it to include the other traits that define each one. public class Character { int height; public Character battle(Character c) { if (this.height > c.height) return this; else if (this.height < c.height) return c; else return this; } } Is there a better way to organize the classes? I've looked at the strategy pattern and the mediator pattern, but I'm not sure how either of them (if any) could help here. My goal is to reach some kind of common battle method, so that if an Ogre meets an Ogre it uses the Ogre-vs-Ogre battle, but if an Ogre meets a Wizard, it uses a more generic one. Further, what if the characters that meet share no common traits? How can we decide who wins a battle?

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• C#: How to inherit constructors?

  - by Ian Boyd

  Imagine a base class with many constructors and a virtual method public class Foo { ... public Foo() {...} public Foo(int i) {...} ... public virtual void SomethingElse() {...} ... } and now I want to create a descendant class that overrides the virtual method: public class Bar : Foo { public override void SomethingElse() {...} } And another descendant that does some more stuff: public class Bah : Bar { public void DoMoreStuff() {...} } Do I really have to copy all constructors from Foo into Bar and Bah? And then if I change a constructor signature in Foo, do I have to update it in Bar and Bah? Is there no way to inherit constructors? Is there no way to encourage code reuse?

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• coding in native language

  - by radi

  is it possible to someone to invent a new programming language in his native language , and if it possible how to do that and what the tools he need to write compiler for it . thanks .

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• Service Layer Patter - Could we avoid the service layer on a specific case?

  - by lidermin

  Hi, we are trying to implement an application using the Service Layer Pattern cause our application needs to connect to other multiple applications too, and googling on the web, we found this link of a demostrative graphic for the "right" way of apply the pattern: martinfowler.com - Service Layer Pattern But now we have a question: what if our system needs to implement some business logic, only for our application (like some maintenance data for the system itself) that we don't need to share with other systems. Based on this graphic: As it seems, it will be unnecesary to implement a service layer just for that; it will be more practical to avoid the service layer, and just go from User Interface to the Business Layer (for example). What should be the right way in this case to implement the Service Layer Pattern? What do you suggest us for a scenario like the one I told you? Thanks in advance.

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• Service Layer Patter - Could we avoid the service layer on a specific case?

  - by lidermin

  Hi, we are trying to implement an application using the Service Layer Pattern cause our application needs to connect to other multiple applications too, and googling on the web, we found this link of a demostrative graphic for the "right" way of apply the pattern: martinfowler.com - Service Layer Pattern But now we have a question: what if our system needs to implement some business logic, only for our application (like some maintenance data for the system itself) that we don't need to share with other systems. Based on this graphic: As it seems, it will be unnecesary to implement a service layer just for that; it will be more practical to avoid the service layer, and just go from User Interface to the Business Layer (for example). What should be the right way in this case to implement the Service Layer Pattern? What do you suggest us for a scenario like the one I told you? Thanks in advance.

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• Business Applications: What are the fundemental features of a search form?

  - by Jonathan Allen

  In a typical business application it is quite common to have forms that are used for searching. Some basic features are: A pane that contains the search criteria A grid to display the results Sorting on the grid A detail page that opens when an item is selected in the results grid What other features would you expect in a business application's search functionality?

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• Guid Primary /Foreign Key dilemma SQL Server

  - by Xience

  Hi guys, I am faced with the dilemma of changing my primary keys from int identities to Guid. I'll put my problem straight up. It's a typical Retail management app, with POS and back office functionality. Has about 100 tables. The database synchronizes with other databases and receives/ sends new data. Most tables don't have frequent inserts, updates or select statements executing on them. However, some do have frequent inserts and selects on them, eg. products and orders tables. Some tables have upto 4 foreign keys in them. If i changed my primary keys from 'int' to 'Guid', would there be a performance issue when inserting or querying data from tables that have many foreign keys. I know people have said that indexes will be fragmented and 16 bytes is an issue. Space wouldn't be an issue in my case and apparently index fragmentation can also be taken care of using 'NEWSEQUENTIALID()' function. Can someone tell me, from there experience, if Guid will be problematic in tables with many foreign keys. I'll be much appreciative of your thoughts on it...

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• What's an easy way to set up object communication in Obj-C?

  - by seaworthy

  I am trying to send a slider value from a controller object to a method of a model object. The later is implemented in the separate file and I have appropriate headers. I think the problem is that I am not sure how to instantiate the receiver in order to produce a working method for the controller. Here is the controller's method. -(IBAction)setValue:(id)slider {[Model setValue:[slider floatValue]];} @implementation Model -(void)setValue:(float)n{ printf("%f",n); } @end What I get is 'Model' may not respond to '+setValue' warning and no output in my console. Any insight is appreciated.

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• How do I recover from an unchecked exception?

  - by erickson

  Unchecked exceptions are alright if you want to handle every failure the same way, for example by logging it and skipping to the next request, displaying a message to the user and handling the next event, etc. If this is my use case, all I have to do is catch some general exception type at a high level in my system, and handle everything the same way. But I want to recover from specific problems, and I'm not sure the best way to approach it with unchecked exceptions. Here is a concrete example. Suppose I have a web application, built using Struts2 and Hibernate. If an exception bubbles up to my "action", I log it, and display a pretty apology to the user. But one of the functions of my web application is creating new user accounts, that require a unique user name. If a user picks a name that already exists, Hibernate throws an org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException (an unchecked exception) down in the guts of my system. I'd really like to recover from this particular problem by asking the user to choose another user name, rather than giving them the same "we logged your problem but for now you're hosed" message. Here are a few points to consider: There a lot of people creating accounts simultaneously. I don't want to lock the whole user table between a "SELECT" to see if the name exists and an "INSERT" if it doesn't. In the case of relational databases, there might be some tricks to work around this, but what I'm really interested in is the general case where pre-checking for an exception won't work because of a fundamental race condition. Same thing could apply to looking for a file on the file system, etc. Given my CTO's propensity for drive-by management induced by reading technology columns in "Inc.", I need a layer of indirection around the persistence mechanism so that I can throw out Hibernate and use Kodo, or whatever, without changing anything except the lowest layer of persistence code. As a matter of fact, there are several such layers of abstraction in my system. How can I prevent them from leaking in spite of unchecked exceptions? One of the declaimed weaknesses of checked exceptions is having to "handle" them in every call on the stack—either by declaring that a calling method throws them, or by catching them and handling them. Handling them often means wrapping them in another checked exception of a type appropriate to the level of abstraction. So, for example, in checked-exception land, a file-system–based implementation of my UserRegistry might catch IOException, while a database implementation would catch SQLException, but both would throw a UserNotFoundException that hides the underlying implementation. How do I take advantage of unchecked exceptions, sparing myself of the burden of this wrapping at each layer, without leaking implementation details?

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• What are the responsibilities of the data layer?

  - by alimac83

  I'm working on a project where I had to add a data layer to my application. I've always thought that the data layer is purely responsible for CRUD functions ie. shouldn't really contain any logic but should simply retrieve data for the business layer to manipulate. However I'm a little confused with my project because I'm not sure whether I've structured my app correctly for this scenario. Basically I'm trying to retrieve a list of products from the database that fall within a certain pricing threshold. At the moment I have a function in my data layer that basically returns all products where price min threshold and price < max threshold. But it got me thinking that maybe this is incorrect. Should the data layer simply return a list of ALL products and then the business logic do the filtering? I'm pretty confused over whether the data layer should simply provide methods that allow the business layer to get raw data or whether it should be responsible for getting filtered data too? If anyone has an article or something explaining this in detail it'd be very helpful. Thanks

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• Understanding MongoDB (and NoSQL in general) and how to make the best use of it

  - by Earlz

  Hello, I am beginning to think that my next project I am wanting to do would work better with a NoSQL solution. The project would either involve a ton of 2-column tables or a ton of dynamic queries with dynamically generated columns in a traditional SQL database. So I feel a NoSQL database would be much cleaner. I'm looking at MongoDB and it looks pretty promising. Anyway, I'm attempting to make sense of it all. Also, I will be using MongoMapper in Ruby. Anyway though, I'm confused as to how to layout things in such a freeform database. I've read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170152/nosql-best-practices and the answer there says that normalization is usually bad in a NoSQL DB. So how would be the best way of laying out say a simple blog with users, posts, and comments? My natural thought was to have three collections for each and then link them by a unique ID. But this apparently is wrong? So, what are some of the ways to lay out such a thing? My concern with the answer given in the other question is, what if the author's name changed? You'd have to go through updating a ton of posts and comments. But is this an okay thing to do with NoSQL?

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• CSS box around box technique

  - by webzide

  Dear Experts, I was trying to make an CSS division box with content in it as well as a border around it. Instead of using the box-border technique, I was trying out a new box to box technique instead. <html> <head> <style type="text/css"> #outer{ height: 20px; width: 20px; background-color:#233D78; } #inner{ height:18px; width: 18px; background-color: #FFF; font-size: 1em; text-align:center; font-family:'Bookman Old Style', serif; padding: 0px; margin-top: 1px; margin-right:auto; margin-left:auto; margin-bottom:1px; vertical-align:middle; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="outer"><div id="inner">TEXT</div></div> </body> </html> Somehow the borders are just not showing up right with FireFox. I tried everything. Setting up the Paddings of both boxes, margin, and messing around with the width. TO be honest, it took me around 30min to do this and I still can't get it right :( I know that a way to achieve the same result would be setting up a border around just one box. But I just wanna learn this box around box background-color technique. THanks in advance

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• How to leverage Spring Integration in a real-world JMS distributed architecture?

  - by ngeek

  For the following scenario I am looking for your advices and tips on best practices: In a distributed (mainly Java-based) system with: many (different) client applications (web-app, command-line tools, REST API) a central JMS message broker (currently in favor of using ActiveMQ) multiple stand-alone processing nodes (running on multiple remote machines, computing expensive operations of different types as specified by the JMS message payload) How would one best apply the JMS support provided by the Spring Integration framework to decouple the clients from the worker nodes? When reading through the reference documentation and some very first experiments it looks like the configuration of an JMS inbound adapter inherently require to use a subscriber, which in a decoupled scenario does not exist. Small side note: communication should happen via JMS text messages (using a JSON data structure for future extensibility).

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• Binary Search Tree for specific intent

  - by Luís Guilherme

  We all know there are plenty of self-balancing binary search trees (BST), being the most famous the Red-Black and the AVL. It might be useful to take a look at AA-trees and scapegoat trees too. I want to do deletions insertions and searches, like any other BST. However, it will be common to delete all values in a given range, or deleting whole subtrees. So: I want to insert, search, remove values in O(log n) (balanced tree). I would like to delete a subtree, keeping the whole tree balanced, in O(log n) (worst-case or amortized) It might be useful to delete several values in a row, before balancing the tree I will most often insert 2 values at once, however this is not a rule (just a tip in case there is a tree data structure that takes this into account) Is there a variant of AVL or RB that helps me on this? Scapegoat-trees look more like this, but would also need some changes, anyone who has got experience on them can share some thougts? More precisely, which balancing procedure and/or removal procedure would help me keep this actions time-efficient?

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• Rails Full Engine using a Full Engine

  - by SirLenz0rlot

  I've got this full rails engine Foo with functionality X. I want to make another engine, engine Bar, that is pretty much the same, but override funcitonality x with y. (it basically does the same, but a few controller actions and views are differently implemented). (I might split this later in several mountable engines, but for now, this will be the setup: project Baz, using engine Bar, which uses engine Foo) I would like to know if there are any pitfalls. It doesn't seem like a pattern that is often used? Anybody else using this 'some sort of engine inheritance'?

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• Break a class in twain, or impose an interface for restricted access?

  - by bedwyr

  What's the best way of partitioning a class when its functionality needs to be externally accessed in different ways by different classes? Hopefully the following example will make the question clear :) I have a Java class which accesses a single location in a directory allowing external classes to perform read/write operations to it. Read operations return usage stats on the directory (e.g. available disk space, number of writes, etc.); write operations, obviously, allow external classes to write data to the disk. These methods always work on the same location, and receive their configuration (e.g. which directory to use, min disk space, etc.) from an external source (passed to the constructor). This class looks something like this: public class DiskHandler { public DiskHandler(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int space = getAvailableSpace(); ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } There's quite a bit more going on, but this will do to suffice. This class needs to be accessed differently by two external classes. One class needs access to the read operations; the other needs access to both read and write operations. public class DiskWriter { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskWriter() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { diskHandler.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskReader() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskHandler.getAvailableSpace(...); } } At this point, both classes share the same class, but the class which should only read has access to the write methods. Solution 1 I could break this class into two. One class would handle read operations, and the other would handle writes: // NEW "UTILITY" CLASSES public class WriterUtil { private ReaderUtil diskReader; public WriterUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... diskReader = new ReaderUtil(dir, minSpace); } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(); ... } } public class ReaderUtil { public ReaderUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } // MODIFIED EXTERNALLY-ACCESSING CLASSES public class DiskWriter { WriterUtil diskWriter; public DiskWriter() { diskWriter = new WriterUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { diskWriter.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { ReaderUtil diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new ReaderUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(...); } } This solution prevents classes from having access to methods they should not, but it also breaks encapsulation. The original DiskHandler class was completely self-contained and only needed config parameters via a single constructor. By breaking apart the functionality into read/write classes, they both are concerned with the directory and both need to be instantiated with their respective values. In essence, I don't really care to duplicate the concerns. Solution 2 I could implement an interface which only provisions read operations, and use this when a class only needs access to those methods. The interface might look something like this: public interface Readable { int getAvailableSpace(); } The Reader class would instantiate the object like this: Readable diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new DiskHandler(...); } This solution seems brittle, and prone to confusion in the future. It doesn't guarantee developers will use the correct interface in the future. Any changes to the implementation of the DiskHandler could also need to update the interface as well as the accessing classes. I like it better than the previous solution, but not by much. Frankly, neither of these solutions seems perfect, but I'm not sure if one should be preferred over the other. I really don't want to break the original class up, but I also don't know if the interface buys me much in the long run. Are there other solutions I'm missing?

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