OO and Writing Drupal Modules - drupal

Preface: Yes, I've read:
http://drupal.org/node/547518
I am writing 'foo' module for Drupal6, where I am organizing the code in an OO fashion.
There's a class called Foo that has a bunch of setters and accessors, and it is working quite well at abstracting some pretty nasty code and SQL.
The question is is it common practice to expose a class for other modules, or is it better to wrap things in the more typical foo_myfnname()?
For example, if I am writing the module's docs, should I tell people to do this:
$foo = new Foo();
$something = $foo->get_something();
or tell them to call:
foo_get_something();
which under the hood does:
function foo_get_something() {
$foo = new Foo();
return $foo->get_something();
}

Difficult to say, and I don't think there is something like a 'common practice' for this. Taking the ubiquitous views module as an example hints on wrapping common API calls in 'standard' functions, and leaving the usage of the object(s) for advanced stuff only.
Personally I'd base the decision on the intended API audience. If you're addressing the 'broad' Drupal user base, forcing them to use Classes is probably (unfortunately/annoyingly) still a bit stretching, as many part time PHP users will have no proper concept of OOP (heck, even 'professional' PHP devs often don't have it).
If on the other side your intended audience consists of developers only, providing a proper OO layer 'as is' should be ok, and probably less confusing than the mixture that results otherwise (using views as an example again, I often started using one of the convenience wrapper functions, and found myself rewriting quite some code later on just because I needed this tiny little change that required direct object usage - better to be consistent and use objects from the beginning).

Related

JavaScript library functions in global namespace - drawbacks?

JS libraries like Underscore.js and LoDash.js provide functions, usually via a global object _:
_.map(...);
_.filter(...);
Such basic functions are global functions in Python and part of the standard library:
map(...)
filter(...)
If I promoted the library functions to global functions...
window.map = _.map;
window.filter = _.filter;
map(...);
filter(...);
... what downsides would there be (other than global namespace pollution)?
Do I have to expect any performance issues?
Will it lead to errors in certain browsers? (e.g. if a built-in JS function is overwritten by a library function, which in turn relies on the native function)
Will chaining still work?
There are multiple downsides, but performance is not likely to be one of them.
What if two libraries have a map() function and the behaviors are slightly different? If they both put their map() in the global space, you won't be able to access one of them. And you might not be able to easily know that the map() you actually want has been overwritten.
By the way, map() and filter() are part of recent-ish JS implementations, but even there, they are part of the prototype of the objects that use them. So you have Array.prototype.map() and Array.prototype.filter().
Here are some reasons to avoid making lots of things like map and filter be global variables:
Naming conflicts with other code/libraries attempting to do something similar, but incompatible. If all code is using numerous global functions, then the simple definition of a single global function could completely break your app because it would be redefining such a function used for something else somewhere else in the code. This, all by itself, is a reason to use as few globals as possible. In a team project or a project using significant third party libraries, this is impossible to manage and will inevitably lead to lost productivity or, even worse, bad bugs that might not immediately be apparent.
Code modules are less self describing when a symbol is just global. Hmmm, where does the symbol map() come from. Is this built in? Is it defined locally? Is it defined by some library? It's a lot easier to know where gutils.map() comes from (from the gutils module). Large numbers of global anything is just less maintainable than breaking things into well defined modules.
There are numerous advantages to defining functions as methods on the objects on which they operate (such as ES5 .map() and .filter() being methods on the Array object rather than as generic globals). Now, it is considered bad practice to add non-standard methods to existing built-in objects (also for naming collision reasons), but adding polyfills that implement standard behavior is encouraged.
See these references for other info:
How and Why to Avoid Globals in Javascript
I've Heard Global Variables Are Bad, What Alternative Solution Should I Use?
Essential Javascript Namespacing Patterns
Javascript Namespaces and Modules
How do I declare a namespace in JavaScript?
As to the topic of performance, it should not be your first concern and will likely not even be a relevant concern in most code. It is much more important to start with a robust, maintainable coding strategy and then optimize only small pieces of code where performance is critical than to sacrifice robustness at the beginning in the name of performance.
In any tight loop where performance is criticial, you can always assign any function to a local variable to slightly improve performance and this will be faster than either a module reference or a global reference (because locals are resolved before globals).
So, if you had gUtils.map() in a module and you want to maximize performance inside a particular function, you can do this:
function x() {
var map = gUtils.map;
for (var i = 0; i < someBigNumber; i++) {
map(...);
}
}
Consider a library like this,
_ = (function(){
lib = {};
lib.function1 = function(){
//code
};
lib.function2 = function(){
this.function1();
};
//more code
return lib;
})();
if you use,
window.function2 = _.function2;
function2();
The library uses "this" operator in function2. Your way changes the scope of the function2 here. The function2() call will give an error saying "function1 is not defined".
You don't need to worry about performance; even if you add an extra layer to a symbol lookup, most modern JS engines will alias it. Nor should you worry about augmenting native objects causing exceptions - that's allowed. No, the big issue is the namespace pollution, which you seem to be a bit dismissive of.
What happens when your code runs on a newer browser that implements these functions natively? Let's say you'd written this code in 2009, and added .map() to Array.prototype. Your code would now have some big issues if someone added a new library that expected one function signature (the native one's) and got a different one (yours).
If you must do this, at least check whether the global symbol already exists, e.g.
window.map = window.map || myLib.map;
Also, make sure that any code relying on your map implementation can either signal its dependencies to a JavaScript dependency management tool like RequireJS, or that you have a robust DM system already in place, and that your native overrides are attached before any other code executes (e.g., don't put your code in an async script tag, don't defer execution until DOMContentLoaded, etc.)

What is the diffrence between a function and a module?

I am very new to c++ and confused between what is the difference between modular programming and function oriented programming.I have never done modular programming so I just know modules by definition that it contains functions.So what is the difference between a sequential(function-oriented language)and modular programming?Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
I was reading about C++'s OOP.It started something like what is unstructured programming, than gave a basic idea about structured programming, than modular programming and finally,OOP.
Modular programming is mostly a strategy to reduce coupling in a computer program, mostly by means of encapsulation.
Before modular programming, local coherence of the code was ensured by structured programming, but global coherence was lacking: if you decided that your spell-checking dictionary would be implemented as a red-black tree, then this implementation would be exposed to everyone else in the program, so that the programmer working on, say, text rendering, would be able to access the red-black tree nodes to do meaningful things with them.
Of course, this became hell once you needed to change the implementation of your dictionary, because then you would have to fix the code of other programmers as well.
Even worse, if the implementation detail involved global variables, then you had to be exceedingly careful of who changed them and in what order, or strange bugs would crop up.
Modular programming applied encapsulation to all of this, by separating the implementation (private to the module) from the interface (what the rest of the program can use). So, a dictionary module could expose an abstract type that would only be accessible through module functions such as findWord(word,dictionary). Someone working on the dictionary module would never need to peek outside that module to check if someone might be using an implementation detail.
They are both ways of structuring your code. If your interested in function-oriented programming and want to understand it a bit better, I'd take a look at lisp. C++ isn't truly function oriented as every function should return a value yet C++ functions can return void (making it a procedure rather than a function), so it's not a true functional programming language in the sense.
"I have never done modular programming so I just know modules by definition that it contains functions".
Modules are a level higher than functions.
That's a good start. Think of a function as a unit of work that does something and when you have several functions that you can group in a certain way, you put them in a module. So, string.h has a bunch of functions for working with strings, but you simply include the header and you have access to all those functions directly. You can then reuse those modules in other projects as you'd already used the modules previously and they've been (I assume) debugged and tested and stop people from reinventing the wheel. The whole point is to benefit from the cumulative experience.
I'd suggest you think of a project you'd like and write some functions and think about how you'd like to organize the code for another developer to use.
Hope this is of some use to you.
I believe functional programming leads us to micro services paradigm as for now while modular programming tends to similar to OOP concept.

Access Modifiers ... Why?

Ok so I was just thinking to myself why do programmers stress so much when it comes down to Access Modifiers within OOP.
Lets take this code for example / PHP!
class StackOverflow
{
private var $web_address;
public function setWebAddress(){/*...*/}
}
Because web_address is private it cannot be changed by $object->web_address = 'w.e.', but the fact that that Variable will only ever change is if your programme does $object->web_address = 'w.e.';
If within my application I wanted a variable not to be changed, then I would make my application so that my programming does not have the code to change it, therefore it would never be changed ?
So my question is: What are the major rules and reasons in using private / protected / non-public entities
Because (ideally), a class should have two parts:
an interface exposed to the rest of the world, a manifest of how others can talk to it. Example in a filehandle class: String read(int bytes). Of course this has to be public, (one/the) main purpose of our class is to provide this functionality.
internal state, which noone but the instance itself should (have to) care about. Example in a filehandle class: private String buffer. This can and should be hidden from the rest of the world: They have no buisness with it, it's an implementation detail.
This is even done in language without access modifiers, e.g. Python - except that we don't force people to respect privacy (and remember, they can always use reflection anyway - encapsulation can never be 100% enforced) but prefix private members with _ to indicate "you shouldn't touch this; if you want to mess with it, do at your own risk".
Because you might not be the only developer in your project and the other developers might not know that they shouldn't change it. Or you might forget etc.
It makes it easy to spot (even the compiler can spot it) when you're doing something that someone has said would be a bad idea.
So my question is: What are the major rules and reasons in using private / protected / non-public entities
In Python, there are no access modifiers.
So the reasons are actually language-specific. You might want to update your question slightly to reflect this.
It's a fairly common question about Python. Many programmers from Java or C++ (or other) backgrounds like to think deeply about this. When they learn Python, there's really no deep thinking. The operating principle is
We're all adults here
It's not clear who -- precisely -- the access modifiers help. In Lakos' book, Large-Scale Software Design, there's a long discussion of "protected", since the semantics of protected make subclasses and client interfaces a bit murky.
http://www.amazon.com/Large-Scale-Software-Design-John-Lakos/dp/0201633620
Access modifiers is a tool for defensive programming strategy. You protect your code consciously against your own stupid errors (when you forget something after a while, didn't understand something correctly or just haven't had enough coffee).
You keep yourself from accidentally executing $object->web_address = 'w.e.';. This might seem unnecessary at the moment, but it won't be unnecessary if
two month later you want to change something in the project (and forgot all about the fact that web_address should not be changed directly) or
your project has many thousand lines of code and you simply cannot remember which field you are "allowed" to set directly and which ones require a setter method.
Just because a class has "something" doesn't mean it should expose that something. The class should implement its contract/interface/whatever you want to call it, but in doing so it could easily have all kinds of internal members/methods that don't need to be (and by all rights shouldn't be) known outside of that class.
Sure, you could write the rest of your application to just deal with it anyway, but that's not really considered good design.

Why are getters prefixed with the word "get"?

Generally speaking, creating a fluid API is something that makes all programmers happy; Both for the creators who write the interface, and the consumers who program against it. Looking beyond conventions, why is it that we prefix all our getters with the word "get". Omitting it usually results in a more fluid, easy to read set of instructions, which ultimately leads to happiness (however small or passive). Consider this very simple example. (pseudo code)
Conventional:
person = new Person("Joey")
person.getName().toLower().print()
Alternative:
person = new Person("Joey")
person.name().toLower().print()
Of course this only applies to languages where getters/setters are the norm, but is not directed at any specific language. Were these conventions developed around technical limitations (disambiguation), or simply through the pursuit of a more explicit, intentional feeling type of interface, or perhaps this is just a case of trickle a down norm. What are your thoughts? And how would simple changes to these conventions impact your happiness / daily attitudes towards your craft (however minimal).
Thanks.
Because, in languages without Properties, name() is a function. Without some more information though, it's not necessarily specific about what it's doing (or what it's going to return).
Functions/Methods are also supposed to be Verbs because they are performing some action. name() obviously doesn't fit the bill because it tells you nothing about what action it is performing.
getName() lets you know without a doubt that the method is going to return a name.
In languages with Properties, the fact that something is a Property expresses the same meaning as having get or set attached to it. It merely makes things look a little neater.
The best answer I have ever heard for using the get/set prefixes is as such:
If you didn't use them, both the accessor and mutator (getter and setter) would have the same name; thus, they would be overloaded. Generally, you should only overload a method when each implementation of the method performs a similar function (but with different inputs).
In this case, you would have two methods with the same name that peformed very different functions, and that could be confusing to users of the API.
I always appreciate consistent get/set prefixing when working with a new API and its documentation. The automatic grouping of getters and setters when all functions are listed in their alphabetical order greatly helps to distinguish between simple data access and advanced functinality.
The same is true when using intellisense/auto completion within the IDE.
What about the case where a property is named after an verb?
object.action()
Does this get the type of action to be performed, or execute the action... Adding get/set/do removes the ambiguity which is always a good thing...
object.getAction()
object.setAction(action)
object.doAction()
In school we were taught to use get to distinguish methods from data structures. I never understood why the parens wouldn't be a tipoff. I'm of the personal opinion that overuse of get/set methods can be a horrendous time waster, and it's a phase I see a lot of object oriented programmers go through soon after they start.
I may not write much Objective-C, but since I learned it I've really come to love it's conventions. The very thing you are asking about is addressed by the language.
Here's a Smalltalk answer which I like most. One has to know a few rules about Smalltalk BTW.
fields are only accessible in the they are defined.If you dont write "accessors" you won't be able to do anything with them.
The convention there is having a Variable (let's anme it instVar1.
then you write a function instVar1 which just returns instVar1 and instVar: which sets
the value.
I like this convention much more than anything else. If you see a : somewhere you can bet it's some "setter" in one or the other way.
Custom.
Plus, in C++, if you return a reference, that provides potential information leakage into the class itself.

Use-cases for reflection

Recently I was talking to a co-worker about C++ and lamented that there was no way to take a string with the name of a class field and extract the field with that name; in other words, it lacks reflection. He gave me a baffled look and asked when anyone would ever need to do such a thing.
Off the top of my head I didn't have a good answer for him, other than "hey, I need to do it right now". So I sat down and came up with a list of some of the things I've actually done with reflection in various languages. Unfortunately, most of my examples come from my web programming in Python, and I was hoping that the people here would have more examples. Here's the list I came up with:
Given a config file with lines like
x = "Hello World!"
y = 5.0
dynamically set the fields of some config object equal to the values in that file. (This was what I wished I could do in C++, but actually couldn't do.)
When sorting a list of objects, sort based on an arbitrary attribute given that attribute's name from a config file or web request.
When writing software that uses a network protocol, reflection lets you call methods based on string values from that protocol. For example, I wrote an IRC bot that would translate
!some_command arg1 arg2
into a method call actions.some_command(arg1, arg2) and print whatever that function returned back to the IRC channel.
When using Python's __getattr__ function (which is sort of like method_missing in Ruby/Smalltalk) I was working with a class with a whole lot of statistics, such as late_total. For every statistic, I wanted to be able to add _percent to get that statistic as a percentage of the total things I was counting (for example, stats.late_total_percent). Reflection made this very easy.
So can anyone here give any examples from their own programming experiences of times when reflection has been helpful? The next time a co-worker asks me why I'd "ever want to do something like that" I'd like to be more prepared.
I can list following usage for reflection:
Late binding
Security (introspect code for security reasons)
Code analysis
Dynamic typing (duck typing is not possible without reflection)
Metaprogramming
Some real-world usages of reflection from my personal experience:
Developed plugin system based on reflection
Used aspect-oriented programming model
Performed static code analysis
Used various Dependency Injection frameworks
...
Reflection is good thing :)
I've used reflection to get current method information for exceptions, logging, etc.
string src = MethodInfo.GetCurrentMethod().ToString();
string msg = "Big Mistake";
Exception newEx = new Exception(msg, ex);
newEx.Source = src;
instead of
string src = "MyMethod";
string msg = "Big MistakeA";
Exception newEx = new Exception(msg, ex);
newEx.Source = src;
It's just easier for copy/paste inheritance and code generation.
I'm in a situation now where I have a stream of XML coming in over the wire and I need to instantiate an Entity object that will populate itself from elements in the stream. It's easier to use reflection to figure out which Entity object can handle which XML element than to write a gigantic, maintenance-nightmare conditional statement. There's clearly a dependency between the XML schema and how I structure and name my objects, but I control both so it's not a big problem.
There are lot's of times you want to dynamically instantiate and work with objects where the type isn't known until runtime. For example with OR-mappers or in a plugin architecture. Mocking frameworks use it, if you want to write a logging-library and dynamically want to examine type and properties of exceptions.
If I think a bit longer I can probably come up with more examples.
I find reflection very useful if the input data (like xml) has a complex structure which is easily mapped to object-instances or i need some kind of "is a" relationship between the instances.
As reflection is relatively easy in java, I sometimes use it for simple data (key-value maps) where I have a small fixed set of keys. One one hand it's simple to determine if a key is valid (if the class has a setter setKey(String data)), on the other hand i can change the type of the (textual) input data and hide the transformation (e.g simple cast to int in getKey()), so the rest of the application can rely on correctly typed data.
If the type of some key-value-pair changes for one object (e.g. form int to float), i only have to change it in the data-object and its users but don't have to keep in mind to check the parser too. This might not be a sensible approach, if performance is an issue...
Writing dispatchers. Twisted uses python's reflective capabilities to dispatch XML-RPC and SOAP calls. RMI uses Java's reflection api for dispatch.
Command line parsing. Building up a config object based on the command line parameters that are passed in.
When writing unit tests, it can be helpful to use reflection, though mostly I've used this to bypass access modifiers (Java).
I've used reflection in C# when there was some internal or private method in the framework or a third party library that I wanted to access.
(Disclaimer: It's not necessarily a best-practice because private and internal methods may be changed in later versions. But it worked for what I needed.)
Well, in statically-typed languages, you'd want to use reflection any time you need to do something "dynamic". It comes in handy for tooling purposes (scanning the members of an object). In Java it's used in JMX and dynamic proxies quite a bit. And there are tons of one-off cases where it's really the only way to go (pretty much anytime you need to do something the compiler won't let you do).
I generally use reflection for debugging. Reflection can more easily and more accurately display the objects within the system than an assortment of print statements. In many languages that have first-class functions, you can even invoke the functions of the object without writing special code.
There is, however, a way to do what you want(ed). Use a hashtable. Store the fields keyed against the field name.
If you really wanted to, you could then create standard Get/Set functions, or create macros that do it on the fly. #define GetX() Get("X") sort of thing.
You could even implement your own imperfect reflection that way.
For the advanced user, if you can compile the code, it may be possible to enable debug output generation and use that to perform reflection.

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