Saulo Silva's Blog

The last release of  Java—version 1.6.0 update 21—was rebranded as being made by “Oracle” instead of “Sun Microsystems, Inc”.

The problem is that Eclipse uses that value to decide on whether to pass a specific argument to the Virtual Machine or not.

This change affects versions 3.3 (released in 2007) to 3.6 (released in 2010), causing the IDE to hang consistently, without any error messages.

The guys at Eclipse.org have posted three workarounds for this issue. (Since I’m using Helios, I opted for no. 3.)

Here is the bug  on the Oracle and on the Eclipse side.

I will try to show with this short article how the concepts of classes and inheritance can be achieved in JavaScript. Only the very basics will be covered here.

If you are unfamiliar with object-oriented programming, I highly recommend reading this Wikipedia article before you proceed.

Classes in my JavaScript?

JavaScript does not have a built-in language construct for the definition of a class per se, but there are a few ways of achieving almost the same concept of an “object blueprint”. One of them is via a function, to which attributes and methods can be attached dynamically. Let’s look at a practical example—let’s implement a simple Animal class:

// Animal class
function Animal(name) {
	// Attributes
	this.name = name;

	// Methods
	this.getName = function() {
		return this.name;
	}

	this.setName = function(name) {
		this.name = name;
		return this;
	}

	this.speak = function() {};
	this.toString = function() {};
}

So this class has a name which is encapsulated by a getter and a setter. It also has two undefined methods. Nothing extraordinary here.

Inheritance

Let’s implement a class Cat that extends Animal. This can be done by assigning an instance of Animal to  Cat.prototype:

// Cat class
Cat.prototype = new Animal(); // A Cat is an Animal
function Cat(name, favouriteFood) {
	// This is how we invoke the constructor of the parent class.
	// Not very nice; we will see a way around this.
	Animal.prototype.constructor.call(this, name);

	// Attributes
	this.favouriteFood = favouriteFood;

	// Methods
	this.speak = function() {
		return 'Meow';
	}

	this.toString = function() {
		return this.getName() + ' is a cat';
	}

	this.getFavouriteFood = function() {
		return this.favouriteFood;
	}
}

Instantiating objects and passing messages is straight forward to those who are familiar with C++/Java:

loup = new Cat("Loup", "tuna");

document.write(
	loup + ' who loves ' + loup.getFavouriteFood() + '.' +
	loup.getName() + ' says "' + loup.speak()+ '".'
);

And the output is:

Loup is a cat who loves tuna. Loup says “Meow”.

Notice the overriding of the methods speak() and toString() in the Cat class.

But wait! There’s more!

We can make the invocation of parent constructors a bit more elegant like this:

// Cat class, version 2
Cat.prototype = new Animal(); // A Cat is an Animal
Cat.prototype.parent = Animal.prototype;
function Cat(name, favouriteFood) {
	// This is how we invoke the constructor of the parent class.
	// See how this is much better?
	this.parent.constructor.call(this, name);
	…

But now for every inheritance we would need to copy and paste lines 2 and 3. We can reduce code repetition by creating a method as follows:

Function.prototype.inheritFrom = function(parentClass) {
	this.prototype = new parentClass();
	this.prototype.parent = parentClass.prototype;
}

Since our classes are actually JavaScript functions, we can add any method or attribute to Function and it will be available to any of our classes. Lines 2 and 3 above are almost exactly as we had before: “Cat” was replaced by “this” and “Animal” was replaced by the reference “parentClass”.

Here is how we would use it:

// Cat class, version 3
Cat.inheritFrom(Animal); // A Cat is an Animal
function Cat(name, favouriteFood) {
…

That’s it!

The final version of the code can be tested here.

If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, there are a couple of powerful and robust frameworks out there that will achieve the same functionality and much more. Prototype is one of them.

So there you go, this should get you started with OOP in JavaScript!

If you find any mistakes or if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

References: Classical Inheritance in JavaScript by Douglas Crockford and OOP in JS, Part 2 : Inheritance by Gavin Kistner.

I wanted to read a properties file from a servlet without using a hard-coded, absolute path. I tried to search on the web for a portable solution, but I couldn’t find anything.

Here is the trick: use ServletContext.getRealPath(String). For instance, a file called “config.properties” located in “WEB-INF”, can be loaded like this:

public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
	String pathToPropertiesFile =
		config.getServletContext().getRealPath("")
		+ "/WEB-INF/config.properties";
	Properties properties = new Properties();
	properties.load(new FileInputStream(pathToPropertiesFile));
}

In one of the courses I took this session I was introduced to aspect-oriented programming. For those who are not familiar with it, an aspect can be used to implement a concern that is crosscutting among different components.

There are a few such concerns that are commonly affected by crosscutting, namely: authentication, persistence, logging and contract checking.

It is argued that with object-oriented programming, even after proper refactoring, it is not always possible to map a requirement to a single component. When a requirement is implemented by more than one component, scattering occurs. AOP allows you to localize the scattered requirement into an aspect.

AspectJ is an extension to the Java language that adds support to AOP. An aspect in AspectJ is composed of pointcuts and advices. A pointcut defines the condition that needs to be met in order for the logic in an advice to be executed. A pointcut could be, for instance, the execution of a method in a particular class.

How AspectJ can be useful

Let’s look at an example. Say we want to log when horses drink water and when cows eat grass. Assume we have a class Logger with a static method log(). Here’s what the implementation could look like:

public class Horse {
	private int consumedWaterInLitres;

	public void drink() {
		consumedWaterInLitres++;
		Logger.log("A horse is drinking water.");
	}
}

public class Cow {
	private int consumedGrassInGrams;

	public void eat() {
		consumedGrassInGrams++;
		Logger.log("A cow is eating grass.");
	}
}

The argument is that the concern of logging is now crosscut among the Horse and Cow components. In addition, it can be said that Horse.drink() and Cow.eat() are responsible for more core logic (eating and drinking) than they should have been. Let’s try to fix this problem with an aspect:

public aspect Logging {
	pointcut logHorseDrinking() : call(public void Horse.drink());
	pointcut logCowEating() : call(public void Cow.eat());

	void after() : logHorseDrinking() {
		Logger.log("A horse is drinking water.");
	}

	void after() : logCowEating() {
		Logger.log("A cow is eating grass.");
	}
}

Here we defined two pointcuts that capture calls to Horse.drink() and to Cow.eat(). We’ve attached these pointcuts to two advices that will run after these methods are executed. With the Logging aspect in place, we can now remove all calls to Logger.log() from Horse and Cow. Isn’t that great?

How AspectJ can be dangerous

Aspects can also add state, behaviour and inheritance to a component. Privileged aspects have access to all features in a system—including private ones. Does that raise a red flag? Let’s look at the class Dog below.

public class Dog {
}

It has no features—no attributes nor methods—and doesn’t extend from any class, right? Wrong:

public aspect DogAspect {
	declare parents: Dog extends Animal;
	private String Dog.ownersName = "Bobert";

	public String Dog.getOwnwersName() {
		return ownersName;
	}
}

The aspect above has completely changed the class Dog. It has made it an Animal, it has added an attribute ownersName and a getter for it. The worst part is that Dog is completely oblivious to the aspect—it will never know about it. In fact, unless you as a developer look at all aspects on the system, you will never know about it either.

That is not completely true because some IDEs will provide a visual clue whenever a class is affected by an aspect. The AspectJ Developement Tools add-on for Eclipse (a great IDE by the way) is supposed to show a marker on the editor margin whenever a component is being advised by an aspect. I have the latest version installed (ADJT 1.6.4) but for some reason the marker is not showing up, unfortunately.

There are also other issues one might encounter when using AspectJ. It is not an easy task to document the impact aspects have on a system—UML has no support for aspects at this moment, and how are you going to show that on a sequence diagram? Also, the debugging and tracing of execution of a class that is being advised by an aspect can get pretty tricky.

In conclusion

I believe that the application of AOP could indeed improve the quality of a system through the localization of crosscutting concerns. However, its Java implementation—AspectJ—provides a level of control that is too risky to be used in industrial medium- to large-scale projects. Its supporting technologies and documenting tools have not yet reached the desired maturity level.

Since last summer I’ve been working with three other Software Engineering undergraduates on a web enterprise application that will eventually replace a legacy ERP system. We used patterns from Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (a great book, by the way), and the well-known three-layered architecture.

One day we had a discussion related to the persistence of Domain Models and whether we should enforce foreign-key constraints at the database level. My first reaction was that the very use of a relational database implied the enforcement of such constraints, but some of my colleagues argued that the database should be seen as nothing but a persistence mechanism and therefore we should avoid placing any business logic in it. We ended up by not using foreign-key constraints.

Would you have done otherwise? I would like to hear what other software engineers/developers have to say about this.

Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates. My last semester has been a little bit hectic, but in three months I’ll be a (Junior) Software Engineer! :)

Here’s a little video I just stumbled upon on reddit. It’s pure gold.