Decorator Design Pattern

In this class we have learned Few design pattern and when you look at history of pattern there are several design pattern out there that I haven’t learned. Well today I am going to tack about Decorator design pattern where I am going to show you how I used it to make my code look professional. With Example. Let’s start with what is Decorator Design pattern and how can we implement it in code.

Decorator is a structural design pattern that lets you attach new behaviors to objects by placing these objects inside special wrapper objects that contain the behaviors. The intent is to attach a responsibility to an object at runtime. Sometimes we want to add a responsibility to an object A, not its whole class. … This can be done by wrapping A in another object that adds the responsibility. In other world clint has freedom to create object and then extend it by adding a varity of future to it. just like weapping a gift, putting it in a box and weapping the box.

What are success and failure of using this pattern? So let’s start with successes when you use this pattern in code extend an object’s behavior without making a new subclass., You can add or remove responsibilities from an object at runtime.,  also You can combine several behaviors by wrapping an object into multiple decorators. Now the failures so  It’s hard to remove a specific wrapper from the wrappers stack., The initial configuration code of layers might look pretty ugly.

now let me give you example of how I used it in code.this is just Class diagram. With Step by step about how to implement it.

Step 1: Create an interface FlyBehavior.java witch is blue print to the class which we will Decorate.

Step 2: Create concrete classes implementing the same interface. like FlyWithWings.java and FlyNoWay.java witch will create dynamically.

Step 3: Create abstract decorator class implementing the Shape interface like Duck.java witch contain refrence to interface.

step 4: Create concrete decorator class extending the Duck.java class. RedHeadDuck.java

Step 5: Use the RedHeadDuck to decorate DuckSimulator objects. witch will verigy the outPut.

Now how this pattern have connection with other pattern. Adapter changes the interface of an existing object, while Decorator enhances an object without changing its interface. Decorator lets you change the skin of an object, while Strategy lets you change the guts. Composite and Decorator have similar structure diagrams since both rely on recursive composition to organize an open-ended number of objects.

Reference:https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/the-decorator-pattern-set-2-introduction-and-design/

https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/decorator

From the blog CS@Worcester – </electrons> by 3electrones and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

REFACTORING

As I was reading some articles, websites for my previous assignments, I came across the term refactoring a lot. However, that was not the only time seeing that as it is part of the course syllabus. I decided to learn more about refactoring and write something on it for my weekly blog post. After going through some resources, articles I finally settled on this blog post that talks about refactoring. The structure of this blog is made simple, easy to learn and understand especially for beginners and those new to the term. It also provides links to some terms, books and some other IDEs mentioned.

This blog defines refactoring as the process that involves editing and cleaning up previously written software codes without changing the function of the code at all. Blog talks about the importance of refactoring, reasons for refactoring and how to perform refactoring. It also provides some techniques on how to perform refactoring. Each technique is well explained and broken down into subtopics and/or steps with some diagrams provided. Also, blog talks about when refactoring is not needed, best practices for refactoring and general summary refactoring.

In this blog I learned that the basic purpose of refactoring is to make codes efficient and maintainable, reduce technical cost, improves readability, and help prevent future bugs. A term that I found interesting as I was reading about the importance of code refactoring is code rot. Further research from Wikipedia explained it as a software decay that is a slow deterioration of software quality over time leading to software becoming unusable or in need of upgrade. Refactoring is important as it help to avoid this code rot.

I also learn that the best time to refactor is before any update or additions to an existing code. This is so as it improves the quality of code and should be done in small steps as possible. Other practices include planning refactoring project and timeline carefully, testing frequently and involving Quality Assurance teams and striving to focus on progress.

I thought that refactoring is always needed especially dealing with very high coded software programs and systems, but I learned from this blog that refactoring is not needed when an application needs to be completely improved.

Some techniques of refactoring I learned are Red-Green Refactor, Refactoring by Abstraction, Composing and Simplifying methods. Before applying the Red-Green Refactor technique, there should first be consideration of what needs to be developed. These developments need to pass basic testing before improvements can be implemented. Refactoring by abstraction is used when there is a large amount of refactoring to be done. I learned that extraction, one of the processes in Composing method, involves breaking down of codes into smaller pieces to find and extract fragmentation. This code is then removed to a separate method and replaced by a call to a new method. This process also involves classes, interface and local variables.

I hope others find this blog useful as well.

https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/engineering/code-refactoring-best-practices-when-and-when-not-to-do-it/

From the blog CS@Worcester – GreenApple by afua3254 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Decorator Design Pattern

I decided that I wanted to talk a little more for the design patterns. This week I will present you another type. Decorator Design Pattern. Decorator design pattern is used to add additional features or behaviors to a particular instance of a class, while not modifying the other instances of same class.  It is a structural pattern, which provides a wrapper to the existing class. The reason why this pattern is in structural design patterns is because they show us how to glue different pieces of a system together in a flexible and extensible fashion. These patterns help us guarantee that when one of the parts changes, the entire application structure does not need to change.

What is the intent of this pattern? In software engineering, decorator design pattern is used to add additional features or behaviors to a particular instance of a class, while not modifying the other instances of same class. The intent of the this pattern is to provide a flexible alternative to sub-classing for extending functionality. This pattern is very important to understand because once you know the techniques of decorating, you’ll be able to give your (or someone else’s) objects new responsibilities without making any code changes to the underlying classes. You can attach new responsibility to an object dynamically. This is exactly the intended use of the decorator pattern. Per the Gang of Four – “Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically”.

When to use this pattern? Decorator Design Pattern has several requirement indicators to suggest that it is potential solution e.g.

  1. We have an object that requires the extension.
  2. Several objects that support the extension by “decoration”. Usually, those objects share a common interface, traits, or superclass, and sometimes, additional, intermediate super-classes .
  3. The decorated object (class or prototype instantiation), and the decorator objects have one or several common features. In order to ensure that functionality, the decorated object & the decorators have a common interface, traits, or class inheritance.

What are the benefit and disadvantages?

·  Sometimes we want to add responsibilities to individual objects, not to an entire class. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing for extending functionality.

·  Avoids feature-laden classes high up in the hierarchy.

·  A decorator and its component aren’t identical.

·  Lots of little objects.

There are a lot of examples and reading that you can do for this design. I would suggest you https://howtodoinjava.com/design-patterns/structural/decorator-design-pattern/ . This is a very good website where it gives details what the Decorator Pattern is and it gives you an example to understand it better. Also https://dzone.com/articles/decorator-design-pattern-in-java . What I like about this website is that it has all the important part in points. Touch only the important part without going to much in details for a beginner.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

YAGNI

Welcome back!

This week in Coding Kitchen, we explore one of the key principles of Extreme Programming, YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It). This principle states that some capability we think our software will need in the future should not be built now because “you aren’t gonna need it“, or as XP co-founder Ron Jeffries put it, “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.”

The YAGNI principle is to be used in conjunction with other practices, such as continuous integration, continuous refactoring and continuous automated unit testing. Without the additional use of any of these other practices, your code could go into Technical Debt, which means it could become disorganized and need to be reworked. Using the YAGNI principle saves you time by helping you to avoid writing code that you do not end up needing and by making your code better because you did not have to fill it with guesses that turned out to be wrong.

In an article posted by Martin Fowler, he uses an example about selling insurance for the shipping business. His example states that an insurance company’s software system is broken into two components, pricing and sales and that the dependencies cannot usefully build sales software until the relevant pricing software is completed. His example also states that while the company works on updating the pricing component to add support for risks from storms, they consider working on a feature they will not need for another six months for piracy pricing. By adding on this additional feature now, Fowler declares that doing so would incur three classes of presumptive features, and four kinds of costs that occur by neglecting YAGNI for them.

1) Wrong feature — Cost of building, cost of carry + cost of delay
2) Right feature, built wrong — Cost of repair, cost of carry + cost of delay
3) Right feature, built right — Cost of carry + cost of delay

I chose this article because this particular example given by Fowler highlights the benefits of using YAGNI and why neglecting to do so would inherently cause many issues and become costly. As a future software engineer, I would prefer having to write less code that is easier to understand rather than have lines of useless, possibly obsolete code. I found Fowlers explanation of YAGNI and his further explanation of the many ways applying this principle could cause problems in comparison to the very few ways it could be of benefit easy to understand and useful. Having knowledge of this principle as a programmer will make writing and editing code in my future professional endeavors much more time and cost effective.

Inspiration and information gathered for this blog post :

https://dzone.com/articles/martin-fowlerbliki-yagni-youre-not-gonna-need-it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it

http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html

From the blog cs@worcester – Coding_Kitchen by jsimolaris and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

UNIFIED MODELING LANGUAGE(UML)

Since we have been using and seeing a lot of UML diagrams in class and in previous assignments, I decided to look for some resources on UML diagrams to broaden my knowledge and understanding. I finally settled on this resource because it gives simplified tutorials on UML diagrams making it easy to understand especially for beginners. Each part is broken down into various topics and subtopics. Page gives useful resources on UML as well.

This resource gives a clear and simplified definition of UML diagram. It has various topics that explains the roles of UML diagrams and goals of UML in Object Oriented Design. It explains the building blocks of UML diagrams which are Things, Relationship and Diagrams. It gives detailed explanations about nine kinds of UML diagrams or format uml diagrams, the three types of UML modeling and UML notations. It also gives sample examples of UML diagrams when explaining some concepts which makes it easy to understand when reading. Page also talks about the 2 broad categories-Structured and Behavioral with each divided into subcategories

In this tutorial, I learned that UML diagram is not a programming language and relates to Object Oriented Design. Initially I thought it was only a pictorial language to build software system, but this page makes it clear that it uses non-software systems as well. UML diagrams are also made for different users, not just developers to understand a software and non-software system. I must say that through UML diagrams in class, I was able to really understand the way a program is structured as well as relationships between the classes, interfaces etc. even before looking at the codes.

In the architecture part of the tutorial, I learned about the roles that UML diagrams plays in different perspectives of a system. These are the design, implementation, process, and deployment. Looking at these perspectives, all the diagrams that I have seen support this. These diagrams make clear of classes, interfaces etc., assembled in a physical state giving an idea about the flow a system/program has. Another important thing that I learned is that UML diagrams helps support the representation of physical nodes of a system that forms the hardware.

I learned that UML notations are very important to make a model that is very meaningful and is something that should be emphasized from the beginning. Some of these notations are Class, Object, Interface, Collaborations, Actor Notations, among others. I learned that the only difference between the Class and Object notations is that name is underlined in Object notations but has same structure and components as the Class Notation. I got confused when I saw a diagram of Active Class Notation as it looked similar to Class notation but I learned that the differences is that Active Class has solid borders and are used to describe concurrent behavior of a system.

I hope others find this source useful

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/uml/uml_standard_diagrams.htm

From the blog CS@Worcester – GreenApple by afua3254 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Docker

Hey guys welcome to week 4 blog. This week I am going to talk about Docker and why is Important. we learn about this in last few classes and I am writing about this platform because it help me and you getting deep understand about how to operate and use this application in seitan way. so let’s start this with what is Docker? so docker is tool that designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run application by using Containers. It includes packages, libraries and other dependencies. You probably wondering how this Work. Well it’s work on Virtual machine. It kind a uses Linux machine. And importantly, it’s open source!!!

you wondering, who is Docker for? Docker is a tool that is designed to benefit both developers and system administrators, making it a part of many DevOps toolchains. For example developers can focused on writing code without worrying about the system that it will ultimately be running on. it also allows them to get a head start by using one of thousands of programs already designed to run in docker to run in Docker containers part of the application. I have used programing platform call QT. Qt is software development platform where you can write code and make you own application and it require a C++ language to run your software. but Docker run on command line. this make developer really easy to developer application and Quicker too.

This container can be thought of as necessitating three categories of software: Builder, Engine, and Orchestration. the main point of using this is making application build faster and docker is way to do it.

Now I will tell you why Docker is good for data Science. When I started as a Data Scientist my focus was always on finding the best algorithm by conducting experiments that would improve my model’s performance. I never really thought much about how I would share my findings and code with others, other than Most of this was the environment setup. In many cases, it would be time-consuming and I would give up and get on a call with the main Developer. when you data Scientist you deal with data a lot and also as algorithms. when you run data in Docker you build Docker Image , Run Image.

Sours: https://opensource.com/tags/docker

https://www.docker.com/blog/

From the blog CS@Worcester – </electrons> by 3electrones and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Simple Factory Pattern

Last week I gave you a small introduction in design pattern and explained their benefits in codes. Today I want to talk about one of this design patterns. The Factory Pattern. The reason why I choose this pattern is because I had to use it in one of my projects in java. The Simple Factory is not actually a Design Pattern; it is more of a programming idiom. But it is commonly used, so we will give it a Headfirst Pattern Honorable Mention. Just because Simple Factory is not a REAL pattern does not mean we should not check out how it is put together.

So, what is a simple factory pattern? The Factory Method Pattern defines an interface for creating an object but let us subclasses decide which class to instantiate. Factory Method lets a class defer instantiation to subclasses. As with every factory, the Factory Method Pattern gives us a way to encapsulate the instantiations of concrete types. As in the official definition, you will often hear developers say that the Factory Method lets subclasses decide which class to instantiate. They say “decide” not because the pattern allows subclasses themselves to decide at runtime, but because the creator class is written without knowledge of the actual products that will be created, which is decided purely by the choice of the subclass that is used.

When to use the Factory Design Pattern in Java?

Static Factory methods are common in frameworks where library code needs to create objects of types which may be sub classed by applications using the framework.        

Some or all concrete products can be created in multiple ways, or we want to leave open the option that in the future there may be new ways to create the concrete product.

Factory method is used when Products do not need to know how they are created.

We can use factory pattern where we have to create an object of any one of sub-classes depending on the data provided

There are a lot of examples about the Factory Design online. A lot of website gives a good explanation. I decided to choose the Headfirst Design Patterns by Elisabeth Robson; Kathy Sierra; Bert Bates; Eric Freeman. The chapter four shows talk about this pattern and shows a very good explanation and an example also. Another website that it helped me to understand it better was javarevisited. Again, it explains it with details and examples how it works.

https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/12/factory-design-pattern-java-example.html#:~:text=Factory%20design%20pattern%20is%20used,just%20change%20in%20one%20class.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

You Ain’t Gonna Need It

Hi everyone and welcome to the week 4 of the coding journey blog. For this week’s post I will be talking about a principle called YAGNI which is an abbreviation for you ain’t gonna need it. Now this may seem like a simple topic, but it is very important concept that often gets overlooked in the early stages of programming.

You ain’t gonna need it is one of the key principles to extreme programming and the XP co-founder has states that you should always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them. The basic concept behind this principle is to do the simplest amount of work that would also get the program to work. The goal is to cut down drastically on unnecessary work, and as a result of this there will be higher productivity rates as well as a more simple to understand code. Efficiency is key when it comes to programming. A software can have many lines of code and functions, but this will be an issue if there are much simpler ways to implement those same functions with a lot less work. The process will take a lot longer with more features and down the line make it much more difficult to maintain.

There are a lot of problems that can occur if you try to implement a feature early when it is not necessary at the moment. There are three things that could happen which include having the wrong feature, having the right feature but it is built wrong or the most ideal option is having the right feature that is built right. Now with these results of the features there is also the outcome of costs. The different costs include cost of building, cost of delay, cost of carry and cost of repair. The cost of building is all the effort spent on analyzing, programming and testing a feature. The cost of delay is the lost opportunity to build and release another feature now. The cost of carry is the complexity added by the feature to code, which makes the software harder to modify and debug. The cost of repair is the effort spent on modifying a feature because it is not exactly what you need now. Now these concepts are the input and output as they go hand in hand. If you make the wrong feature then you have to pay the cost of building, carry and delay. If you make the right feature but it’s built wrong then you have to pay cost of repair, carry and delay. Now with the best option if you make the right feature and it is built right then you just pay cost of carry and delay.

In my personal case, I plan to follow the YAGNI principle in all my future projects because it help simplify projects and saves time. It improves my productivity and prevents unnecessary work and problems.

Check out these additional resources: https://medium.com/better-programming/yagni-you-aint-gonna-need-it-f9a178cd8e1

YAGNI

From the blog CS@Worcester – Roller Coaster Coding Journey by fbaig34 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Thoughts on YAGNI

The link at the very bottom is an article focusing on a design philosophy YAGNI which is one of the topics we’re supposed to cover in class, though we haven’t gotten to it yet as of my writing this. The name is an acronym of “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” which is basically means if the situation doesn’t immediately call for something to be done, then don’t bother with it. The acronym’s meaning is also the main reason why I chose to write about this topic; it sounded funny to me. The article goes on to describe four “costs” that YAGNI mitigates. The first is the cost of build which is the time and effort spent on analyzing, programming, and testing something. The second is cost of delay which is the cost of pushing back other priorities in order to work on what is deemed more important. The third is cost of carry, the complexity that something brings to software and how that modifying and debugging more difficult. And the last is cost of repair which is self-explanatory. By only working on what is immediately important, the chances of wasting time or changing the program are reduced significantly.

What I find interesting about YAGNI is that in a way, it’s telling people to wing it. The biggest reason for that is because in everyday life, sometimes plans change because of unforeseen circumstances. Let’s take for example someone meticulously planning out a program while taking multiple scenarios into consideration and designing different components to compensate. But it later turns out that many of these scenarios are either unlikely or are taken care of by other things outside of the program that this person didn’t even know about. That in turn causes cost of carry because of all the components complicating the core program, cost of build from the time and effort wasted on designing and implementing these components. These are a lot of headaches that are solved by just being lazy and that’s kind of funny to me.

Something else I noticed is that YAGNI is a really simple design philosophy, to the point where it isn’t strictly constrained to software design. Another example I’ll bring up is how when I was younger, I would waste time writing essays by agonizing over small minute details. And a piece of advice I would often get is to write out my first draft no matter how horrible and worry about fixing the details when the time comes. That isn’t to say that drafting out an outline isn’t important; this applies both to essay writing and software design. The truth is that there should be a balance between YAGNI and other design principles which the article does acknowledge even though it does downplay it.

Link: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Yagni.html

From the blog CS@Worcester – Rainiery's Blog by rainiery and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CSS Grid: A Better Layout System

Whenever I find myself working on a website, one of the more time-consuming aspects of development is often the CSS (cascading style sheet) code which controls the layout of the site. While CSS properties often have names which are self-explanatory the various formatting tools in CSS can oftentimes be confusing to me.

In the past, using the float property and various div classes to control different sections of the website was my go-to when building webpages for practice. This has since been proceeded by a number of new layout systems now baked into CSS functionalities as more recent versions of CSS have worked to better support modern web-development concepts. As I am looking to improve and modernize my web-development skills to prepare for contract work in the future, it was important that I start looking into the newer layout systems provided by CSS.

The newest layout system introduced by CSS, CSS Grid, is a fairly recent invention. I was looking for a good reference to introduce me to the idea, and I found a great resource on the website css-tricks.com (https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/), which focuses on providing relevant information regarding various CSS standards and techniques. The article provides a complete introduction to the idea of Grid, starting with it’s various properties (display: grid to begin using the layout, various grid-template properties and grid-column/grid-row to control the particular layout of content) and moving further to discuss more specific techniques associated with Grid. I felt that the information about defining gutters (spaces between grid items) was extremely helpful, as gutters vs. borders in web design has been a hard topic for me to wrap my head around for a while, and this page put it into a really easily-understandable format in my opinion.

CSS grid is absolutely what I would use for a modern website design if I were making a site for someone in 2020. Although there exist frameworks such as Bootstrap and Skeleton, a lot of the inner-workings of the page and its layout can be obstructed in a way, and I feel like Grid makes it easy enough to make a great layout without relying on an external framework. Keeping things simple in web-design has always made for a more manageable website in my experience. I would certainly recommend this article to anyone looking to explore CSS Grid as a layout option for a website, the plentiful examples and images make concepts easy to visualize, and the explanations provide a good level of information without seeming overwhelming to someone unfamiliar with the topic.

With CSS grid, I think web-development (in terms of front-end) has become much more accessible, and building a functional and aesthetically pleasing website has become far easier than in the past when reliance on outdated layout formats made things a lot more difficult.

Site Referenced: CSS-Tricks.com

A Complete Guide to Grid

Great resource for learning more about CSS grid!

From the blog CS@Worcester – CodeRoad by toomeymatt1515 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.