Normally the reason why I write blogs is to inform other people about interesting things I found or I am thinking about. Today I will ask some questions and wait for your answer

One of my latest posts was about the spring rich client. Because of this project and picocontainer I read a lot about design patterns. The most obvious design pattern in spring is called dependency injection. This design pattern helps the software architect to loosly couple components. It could work like follows (just for the JSE-developers under us):

class ClassA {
MyInterface objectA;
public void setMyInterface(MyInterface objA) {objectA = objA;}
}

where we could have defined the interface like this:

interface MyInterface{ String toString(); }

Now, ClassA defines a dependency on an instance of MyInterface and the framework (for Java e.g. picocontainer, spring, juice or others) will inject an instance of an implementation of MyInterface into ClassA. It is up to the configuration if objA is a newly created instance or if it is a ’singleton’. (MyInterface could be a class as well.)

For example if you call

ClassA classA = framework.getBean(ClassA.class); //code is similar to picocontainer; not to spring!

You will get back an instance of class ClassA, where objectA is not null! The dependency was defined by the method (setMyInterface) - this is called setter injection. Other kinds of injections are:

• annotation-based injection:
  
  

  class ClassA { @Inject Object objectA; } 
  

  
  
• constructor injection:
  

  class ClassA { Object objectA;
  public ClassA(ObjectA objA) {objectA = objA;}
  } 

Where picocontainer campaigns for constructor and spring for setter injection (but both projects offer at least the mentioned kinds of injection).

It is correct that you can create your own small framework or even set up the objecs by hand to achieve the same: dependency injection. But I guess you are lazy and will choose one of the open source frameworks.

Now, all is explained to understand my 3 questions. Hopefully someone out there will have an answer!

1. How should I design a library?

Let me explain. You want to sell a nice designed, but complex library. The library offers a lot of functionality and you want to split it into loosly coupled components. That means you have to use dependency injection (DI), but you don’t know if the customer has or wants such a DI-framework.

So, if you use e.g. the annotation-based injection it would be nearly impossible for the customer to use your library; with setter or constructor injection it is quite difficult to set up the objects for using your library.

I don’t know what to do: Should I really use dependency injection here? Or should I use a (dynamic) service locator instead; to decouple my components within the library?

Martin Fowler says:

“It (dependency injection) tends to be hard to understand and leads to problems when you are trying to debug. [...] This isn’t to say it’s a bad thing, just that I think it needs to justify itself over the more straightforward alternative (service locator).”

“A common reason people give for preferring dependency injection is that it makes testing easier. The point here is that to do testing, you need to easily replace real service implementations with stubs or mocks. However there is really no difference here between dependency injection and service locator: both are very amenable to stubbing. I suspect this observation comes from projects where people don’t make the effort to ensure that their service locator can be easily substituted.“

“So the primary issue is for people who are writing code that expects to be used in applications outside of the control of the writer. In these cases even a minimal assumption about a Service Locator is a problem.”

So: What would you do? Would you use a service locator or dependency injection inside the library?

And this leads me to the next important question:

2. Why is a singleton an antipattern?

I stumbled over this question while I used picocontainer. They say you have to avoid singletons, because it is difficult to test and to replace. My question is: why? Imagine the following singleton:

class LogFactory{
public static Logger getLogger(Class clazz) { … }
}

Now it is really easy to replace the implementation of the Logger interface e.g. if one defines a setImpl method:

LogFactory.setImpl(LoggerForTesting.class);

So what’s soo wrong with a singleton?

3. How can I avoid making all classes public?

I don’t know if it is the case for autowiring in spring. But in picocontainer you have to set-up the configuration for the wiring of the classes by yourself e.g. in a separate class (with Java; no xml! compiler checks references! yeah!) or in a separate file with a scripting language (or xml) and nanocontainer. That means you could specify the implementations of the interface by:

framework.setImpl(MyInterface.class, FirstImpl.class);

But wouldn’t it mean that I have to add the modifier public to the class FirstImpl? (To let picocontainer call the default constructor.) This can’t be good design to allow the user of my library to see the implementations of MyInterface.

Whats wrong with my use case and my conclusion?

From http://karussell.wordpress.com