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One Singleton to Rule Them All

I would like to preface this post by saying that I don’t like the Singleton design pattern at all. There are some who love it, others who view it as a sometimes-useful, often-abused tool in the toolbox, and then there are people like me who believe that it’s extremely rare to see a use of it that isn’t an abuse — so rare that I consider it better to avoid the pattern altogether. I won’t go into much more detail on my thoughts on the Singleton (stay tuned for that when I get to this pattern in my design patterns series), but here is some further reading that expounds a lot on reasons not to like this pattern:

  1. Scott Densmore: Why Singletons are Evil
  2. Misko Hevery: Singletons are Pathological Liars
  3. Alex Miller: Patterns I Hate
  4. Steve Yegge: Singleton Considered Stupid

With all of those arguments against Singleton in mind, and considering the damage that abuse (and I would argue use) of the pattern causes in code bases, I found myself thinking of code bases I’ve heard of or encountered where the code was littered with Singletons. In these code bases, refactoring becomes daunting for a variety of reasons: the hidden dependencies, the complex temporal dependencies, the sheer volume of references to the Singleton instances, the almost obligatory Law of Demeter violations, etc. Singletons cause/encourage a rich variety of problems in code bases. But I think that something could be done about two such problems: the redundant Singleton implementation logic and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) violation of which Singleton classes are prima facie guilty.

Take a look at how the Singleton is implemented (as recommended by Microsoft, here). The basic implementation initializes the static instance in the property accessor while variants use field initializing syntax and introduce thread safety.

The basic implementation is here:

public class Singleton
{
     private static Singleton instance;

     private Singleton() {}

     public static Singleton Instance
     {
          get
          {
               if (instance == null)
                    instance = new Singleton();
               return instance;
          }
     }
}

More specific even to C# is James Michael Hare’s implementation using the Lazy<T> class to eliminate the redundant if-instance-null-instantiate logic needed in each Singleton class. But that still leaves the redundant Instance property, the redundant _instance field, and the awkwardness (SRP violation) of an object managing its own cardinality. What if we got rid of both of those issues?

public static class Singleton where T : new()
{
     private static readonly Lazy _instance = new Lazy();

     public static T Instance { get { return _instance.Value; } }
}

public static class SingletonClient
{
     public void Demonstrate()
     {
          Singleton.Instance.Write("Look!! Logger isn't a Singleton -- it's a real class!!");
     }
}

Using generics, this implementation allows an instance of every Singleton to be expressed in the code of a single class. In this fashion, any type can be implemented as a Singleton without the type being coupled to an internal Singleton implementation. It also standardizes the Singleton implementation by making sure it exists only once in the code base. With this pattern, there is a similar feel to IoC containers — classes can be implemented without concern for who will instantiate them and how.

Here is my take on the disadvantages and potential disadvantages of this approach:

  1. You still have Singletons in your code base.
  2. This might actually encourage more Singleton usage (though fewer actual Singleton implementations) by removing responsibility for implementation.
  3. Since constructor of object in question must have public default constructor, removes the Singleton gimmick of making the constructor private and thus the safeguard against additional instances being created is also removed.
  4. A natural extension of the previous item is that it remains a matter of documentation or convention to use Singleton<T> and not instantiate rather than it being impossible to instantiate.

But the advantages that I see:

  1. Only one class implements cardinality management, meaning refactoring away from Singleton is nominally easier.
  2. No Singleton SRP violations
  3. Singleton implementation (initialization, lazy load, thread-safety) is standardized to prevent inconsistent approach.
  4. I actually consider preventing the private constructor gimmick to be a plus — particularly where potential refactoring may be needed (and it pretty much always is when Singletons exist).
  5. With this pattern in your code base developers are less likely to be come comfortable/familiar with implementing the Singleton pattern.
  6. No need to introduce interfaces for Singletons to inject instance into classes using dependency injection — just inject a non-Singleton managed instance.
  7. A code base with nothing but normal instances is very easy to reason about and test, so the closer you get to that, the better.

I would like to reiterate that I’m not suggesting that you run out and start doing this everywhere. It mitigates some of the natural problems with the Singleton design pattern but “mitigates some” is a long way from “fixes all”. But, if you have a code base littered with Singletons this could potentially be a nice intermediate refactoring step to at least standardize the singleton implementation and provide slightly more friendly seams to testing legacy code. Or if you’re faced with and outvoted by a group of other developers that love their global variables (er, excuse me, Singletons), this might be a decent compromise to limit the damage they cause to the code’s maintainability. On balance, I’d say that this is an interesting tool to add to your arsenal, but with the caveat that something is probably wrong if you find that you have a use for it.

I’d be curious to hear others’ takes on this as well. I just kind of dreamed this up off the top of my head without taking a lot of time to explore all potential ramifications of it use. If you’ve implemented something like this before or if you have opinions on the advantages/disadvantages that are different than mine or if you see ways it could be improved, I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments.

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A Tale of Two Web Stacks: Java vs .NET

For the last few years, I’ve focused largely on desktop development doing WPF and C#. I’ve dabbled a little here and there in web development, but the lion’s share of my web development up until the last few months occurred several years ago or earlier. Recently, I’ve been doing nothing but web development, in the form of webforms primarily, but also with Java and my home automation projects here at home. One weekend several weeks ago (it was “last weekend” when I started this post) I decided to upgrade my main machine at home from XP to Windows 7, and this required me to wipe everything and start fresh. Part of this meant that I’d have to port my IntelliJ/Spring/Maven/Java setup to a new machine.

I had ported my project from Eclipse to IntelliJ (which went very smoothly — compliments to IntelliJ), so it had been a long time since I’d actually set up a web development project in Java. Interestingly, it had also been a long time since I’d done the same in the ASP world since the work I’ve been doing the last several months had already been setup from a project structure perspective. However, given my situation with the home automation project and the fact that I’m starting on FeedPaper, I’m in a unique position to document my comparative experiences with both, being in the position of generally experienced developer and relatively familiar with the technologies, but not practiced at setting up these specific types of projects. I’ve done this documentation below.

Before you read on, please note that I’m not in the tank for anyone or a fanboy of any technology, company or platform. I’ve spent years developing in both Java and .NET and there are things that I like about both. I’m a happy, equal opportunist polyglot and hope to stay that way. But for me to do so (with Java and .NET at least) would require both technologies to succeed, and I see trouble on the horizon for Java. I don’t like this because I like Java. It was a nice alternative for web development when Microsoft wanted to charge me $500 for Visual Studio and who knows what for whatever else I would have needed to write web applications. I like it because it was real, big boy server side code, capable of expansion to enterprise sites and not sloppy (I’m looking at you PHP). I like it because of the vibrant and inventive community of developers committed to improving it. But, I still think dragons be coming and Java might have a fight on its hands not to become COBOL.

Setting up For Java Web Development in 158 Easy Steps

Here’s why I say there’s trouble. I wanted to set up a minimally functional site with both Java and .NET web technologies — “hello world” in concept. My steps to set up Hello World with Java are detailed here (if you get tired of reading, feel free to skip to the bottom of the list as it is incredibly long):

  1. I download and install IntelliJ Community Edition.
  2. I download and install JDK 7 and create a “JAVA_HOME” environment variable.
  3. I download Tomcat and unzip it in C:\program files\Tomcat.
  4. I set “CATALINA_HOME” environment variable and point it here.
  5. I go to Tomcat’s “webapps” directory and set its permissions to allow anyone to modify since that’s where I’ll be deploying my projects and I don’t want UAC messages each time I do.
  6. I run Tomcat’s “startup.bat” and fire up localhost:8080 to manage tomcat. Fail. HTTP Status 500 – java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.jsp.index_jsp.
  7. I refresh and get a different error: HTTP Status 404 – /.
  8. I try going to the manager URL directly. Error: HTTP Status 500 – java.lang.IllegalStateException: No output folder
  9. I google, but don’t really know what to google, and don’t have much luck.
  10. I try running random bat files in the Tomcat directory with names like “setclasspath.bat”. No joy.
  11. I put quotes around my environment variables since Windows directory names and their spaces are kinda screwy.
  12. Oops, now startup.bat in the Tomcat folder does nothing. So much for that. I put the environment variables back.
  13. I open the file “RUNNING.txt” in Tomcat root directory and see if it has anything helpful to say. It does, but it only covers the stuff I already know (all this environment variable crap and that I should start the web server with startup.sh)
  14. I google again and find nothing useful.
  15. I start looking through the Tomcat output to the Console and see a bunch of exceptions about a log file not existing because access is denied. This doesn’t seem like it ought to be critical, but you never know.
  16. In a scorched Earth approach, I make the entire Tomcat directory writeable by any user and restart Tomcat where I see no more log errors.
  17. Joy! Half an hour in, I have the web server running.
  18. Time to make sure I can see what apps there are — I remember I can do that from the manager.
  19. Tomcat 7 helpfully tells me that I need to configure security for the web server (previous versions didn’t) so I do that by editing tomcat-users.xml.
  20. I uncomment the examples in the file to use and that doesn’t work, I get a 401. But, the 401 is pretty helpful (another improvement) and I follow the directions in it, which unfortunately don’t work.
  21. I try restarting the web server.
  22. Joy! That was my stupid mistake — assuming that the roles were processed at login time rather than startup. 45 minutes in I can manage the web server.
  23. Going back to IntelliJ, I try to create the project I need, but can’t because I don’t have a web template available.
  24. I google and discover I should use Maven.
  25. I read and try to understand what Maven was and where it came from. Don’t really understand (kinda like NuGet I think), but apparently IntelliJ has it so I don’t need to install it or anything.
  26. I try to create a Maven project, which goes fine except for the “Finish” screen, which tells me that the Maven Home Directory is not specified.
  27. I specify it as the directory with the user settings file, but apparently that isn’t right because the Maven Home Directory is “invalid” (no mention of why or where I might find one that isn’t).
  28. I google this error message, wondering why I have to bother with this and why it doesn’t just work. Epic fail. I’m apparently the only one that’s ever had this problem.
  29. I do a search on my hard drive for “maven” and find that there are a few hits in the folder C:\users\erik\.IdeaIC11, so I figure, what they hey, I’ll give that a try. Nope.
  30. I look at the “user settings file” and “local repositories” specified by default and notice they don’t exist, so I create them, figuring that this might make the directory a valid maven directory. It doesn’t.
  31. I google and find this stack overflow post that leads me to an example settings.xml file and I try adding the xml I find there into mine, hoping this might at least result in a new error message. It doesn’t.
  32. I go downstairs and get some soda and take a break.
  33. I come back, wondering whether I have to install maven separately.
  34. Apparently not, according to Jetbrains as it “ships with” IntelliJ. I testily wonder “if it ships with IntelliJ, why the %&$# is it asking me where the Maven directory is?!?”
  35. Back to google. I find this post telling me that “opening maven project is as easy as pie”. I chuckle.
  36. Back to google. Nothing helpful after another 5 or 10 minutes. At this point, I’m 1:15 into this effort.
  37. I decide that I’ll install Maven anyway, whether or not it “ships with” IntelliJ. What can it hurt at this point?
  38. I go to the maven download page and am a bit concerned that IntelliJ says that it integrates with Maven 2 and that a third of the roughly 17,400 options I have for downloading Maven are for a version 3. And which of the version 2’s on there does IntelliJ integrate with. I abandon this plan.
  39. I google again for a while and discover that most problems with the M2_Home/Maven Home seem to be for Linux and Mac users. Apparently there is some sort of known issue there. I wonder if that’s true on Windows at all.
  40. I go get another soda. I’m about 1:45 minutes in now.
  41. I download Apache Maven v2.2.1, reasoning that even messing things up badly at this point would be better than no change (and it takes less time to format my drive, re-install Windows 7 and get all my drivers going than setting up this hello world web project anyway, so how bad can it be?)
  42. I unzip Maven to C:\program files\maven.
  43. I look in the conf folder and see “settings.xml” so, having learned my lesson from Tomcat, I decide to move the whole operation to C:\users\erik\.m2
  44. I try again and it fails using M2_HOME, but when I “override” and type the directory in manually, it works. I guess “defaults to M2_HOME” is a bit of a fib, but that doesn’t matter at this point, since I’ve won.
  45. Joy! About 1:50 in, I have a web server installed and I’ve created my project!
  46. My joy is short-lived as I see that there is no Web-Inf or welcome JSP page or index or anything to indicate that this is a web app. Sigh.
  47. Whatever, let’s at least get what we have building.
  48. I do a “make project” and get an error: “Cannot find home directory C:\program files\java\jdk1.7.0. Update Project Configuration.” I’m actually pretty pumped about this error message since it offers some kind of actionable feedback. My standards, as you can tell, are now pretty low. I mean, you’d think this could be inferred from my “JAVA_HOME”, but whatever.
  49. I go into settings and look under “Compiler” and see nothing about the JDK to user, so back to google.
  50. I find nothing helpful there, so I start randomly looking at menus and context options.
  51. I right click on my module and see “open module settings”, which looks promising. I go to the “Project” under “Project Settings” and see that there is a SDK specified, but it just says “1.7” and it’s red. I click the dropdown and see there’s also 1.7 (1) and that’s red too. Apparently the default is not 1, but 2 copies of a nonexistent JDK. I delete both of those and manually browse to the actual JDK.
  52. Now, I build and nothing happens, which is an improvement. I’m just told “all files are up to date.”
  53. I’m not going to worry too much about that now because I don’t actually seem to have any files, so it stands to reason that there’s nothing to compile.
  54. I’m not sure what the Maven “web-app” goal or archtype or whatever actually did for me, but I did notice something interesting when clicking around called “Add Framework Support”, so I’ll try that.
  55. Bummer, my only option is “Groovy”. Back to the drawing board.
  56. At this point, 2:15 in, I knock off for the day. I’m doing this on nights and weekends and so clearly hello world web app is going to need to be a longer term project than just one day. I have chores and bills and occasionally a life, I’ll have to resume setting up the simplest, most basic web setup imaginable later when I can really devote a lot of time to it. I’ve managed to install the web server and create a project that doesn’t do anything, compile, or even have any files. Quite a productive day, I guess…
  57. I pick back up the next day and, having slept on it, I remember something about adding things to pom.xml. Perhaps if I add Spring stuff to it, the “Add Framework Support” thing will work.
  58. I google and find this stackoverflow post. It’s not particularly helpful, and I consider “add this bunch of random crap to this XML file” to be an enormous framework fail, but misery loves company, and I can see that most people that do this are also confused and that you can “learn the basics of Maven in a few days” if you read a book. I’m not really clear on why this Maven is better than downloading Jars on my own, which wouldn’t take me a few days, but I’m trying to do things the “right way”.
  59. I google some more and find this from Spring, and it looks promising. I still think it’s utterly preposterous that the way to get dependencies is by hunting down blobs of random XML from the internet to copy and paste into a file, but I seem to be making progress. I copy and paste.
  60. I then right click and click “sync Pom.xml” because I seem to remember doing that before and it seems to make sense for some reason.
  61. I try “Add Framework Support” again, but no joy. Still only groovy.
  62. I delete all that XML and flail around google some more.
  63. I find another post where I see some sample XML from another pom, and I see that all that crap I copy and pasted needs to go inside of a “dependencies” tag.
  64. The syntax highlighting looks more promising now, but I try synchronizing and importing and whatnot, and still no framework support. Now there’s a lot of angry red in the IDE about my pom.xml file and a squiggly under it in the project explorer. But, errors are different, and different is progress.
  65. Back to google, and I’m now 2:45 in.
  66. I find another blog post and learn that the “properties” tag needs to go outside of the “dependencies” one. Of course – I shoulda known (/sarcasm). This guy’s blog is pretty helpful — too bad he doesn’t use IntelliJ.
  67. I make the change and synchronize again, and nothing really happens.
  68. After a minute, the squigglies and angry red goes away and suddenly a bunch of stuff about spring appears under “External Libraries”. It’s like magic (but more like a kid putting on a magic show and needing a few mulligans than David Blaine).
  69. This doesn’t help setting up the directory structure to get hello world up and running.  I still have a blank module under a blank project.
  70. I google and find this on stack overflow.  It doesn’t help me, but it is interesting to note that someone experienced in all three technologies (Spring, Maven, IntelliJ) would likely take longer than 30 minutes to set this up.  Someone not experienced with Maven and IntelliJ… 3:00 and counting.
  71. I try creating a new module for the heck of it, to see if maybe this time the “Maven Web App” actually has some kind of directory structure or code in it.
  72. Nope.
  73. I go to delete this module that I don’t want and spend a few minutes getting annoyed until I discover that I have to delete all of the files in the module, then delete the directory, then do it again for reals (it’s separating delete from project and disk).  That took a pointless 5 minutes.
  74. Back to google.
  75. I find this page, which has exactly what I want.  It’d be awesome if it my IntelliJ actually worked like that.
  76. I see that that post was written 9 months ago, so perhaps setups were simpler back then.  Yep, those were the days.
  77. I try creating a new project anyway because I’m really pretty much out of ideas.  Not surprisingly, that doesn’t work.
  78. Back to google.  Nothing.
  79. I start to wonder if it’s even possible to have IntelliJ create a web project directory structure for you.  I could have sworn it worked before when I did this some weeks back.
  80. I find this on the IntelliJ site, which suggests creating a Java module from scratch instead of a web module.  I try that and it doesn’t work, but I try creating a Maven module again and now have the option of creating a Spring project.  I do that, and it actually gives me a “src” directory.  Sweet!  We’re getting somewhere.
  81. This module inside the project also has a pom.xml.  I copy all of the crap from the main pom to this one and try adding framework support.  Nope.
  82. I am seeing “fatal error, cannot find JRE1.7” in the “messages maven goal” window.  I clear the message and I can’t get it to come back.  I have no idea what’s causing it.
  83. At this point, I think it isn’t worth spending anymore effort trying to get the IDE to setup a basic project structure.  Clearly I’m asking the impossible of the incapable.
  84. Luckily, I have the source code for a previous Eclipse project that I converted to IntelliJ laying around, so I re-create that directory structure (I eventually want to be using a lot of the source from this project anyway, so I’ve kind of decided that skipping hello world might, ironically, be easier).
  85. I copy the entire WebContent directory and then copied the structure of src, at which point I copied a few controller java files.
  86. The files I copied have a little j with a red circle around them and a line through them.  That don’t look right, so I google and find this.  I have to specify a “source” directory.  Sigh.  Of course I do.
  87. I follow the instructions in the post and my src directory automatically converts into a package structure (which is admittedly pretty cool) and three of my controllers are error free.
  88. The problem was that they were referencing other files that I need to add, so I start adding them, but that’s where things get wacky.
  89. The package structure seems to work much differently than Eclipse and my package names are getting out of sync with the disk structure and each other, so I delete everything and started over.
  90. I try to google an example package structure for IntelliJ IDEA to mimic, with predictably useless results.
  91. For those keeping score, I’m now about 3:50 in.
  92. I find this on IntelliJ and it’s like a blast of fresh something.  It actually clearly explains something in this byzantine process for the first time in a long time, and I came to understand that IntelliJ’s way of handling packages is actually pretty slick — it lets you retain package names like “com.daedtech.daedalus.controller” without the silly requirement of having 4 nested folder on disk.
  93. I add my second most abstract set of classes to the new structure and do a build, which fails as I wanted it to (red before green, refactor).
  94. I add the most abstract types that these depend on those and then rework the package naming as necessary until compiling is successful (oddly, for one of the broken dependencies, alt-enter works and for the other it doesn’t).
  95. I’m calling it another night (I didn’t start working on this until a little after midnight, so it’s pretty late now).  I figure I’ll go to bed celebrating a win.  4:15 and 95 steps into setting up Java web development, I have compiling code.  Hopefully in the next few hours I can build a WAR file and actually shoot hello world to the screen, to say nothing of setting up the IOC.
  96. Picking back up the next day, I copy all of my code files over and start resolving the differences in package naming.
  97. I spend about 20 minutes resolving all of the various compiler errors and naming issues that resulted from copy.
  98. Now I copy over the ant Build that I had been using and try it out.  Fail.
  99. Start googling what on Earth “‘includeantruntime’ was not set” means.  This helped.  Apparently, I need to set some random attribute in the javac tag that I didn’t need to before for some mysterious reason I might have cared enough to investigate in the first few hours of this.
  100. New set of errors when I try to build.  Cool, different is good.
  101. The errors say that the spring framework package does not exist, which is weird considering the module compiles in the IDE.
  102. Looking at the source files, IntelliJ randomly borked my packages in the files, so I put them back to what they were.  I’m pushing the 4:45 mark and battling the IDE.
  103.  Now onto figuring out why the ant build says springframework packages don’t exist but the IDE compiler says they do.  Apparently, this is some sort of ‘feature’ where plugins compile code differently than the IDE or something.  Boo.
  104.  I do some fruitless googling but don’t really know what to search for.  “Why does Ant suck? ” amuses me but provides no answers.
  105. I see a squiggly under one of my java files and realize that I missed one of the borked package renames.  I have no idea why it would compile with an unresolved reference.  Maybe the Ant compiler is the good one and this mystery, non-functional one the IDE uses is the problem.  My apologies to Ant.
  106. This doesn’t fix the problem of the Ant build not recognizing the spring packages.  Back to flailing around google.
  107. After about 10 minutes, I stumble across this stackoverflow post.  This reminds me that usually there’s some goofiness about “classpath” in both Eclipse and IntelliJ, in my experience, so I poke around the project and module settings looking for something like that.
  108. Poking around, I see something in the Ant properties about “Additional Classpaths”.  I find this.  My suspicion is confirmed.  It’s apparently some kind of insurmountable technical challenge to have the IDE and the build plugin use the same library configuration for building and the task falls to the user.  What a mountain of fail.
  109.  Now I find where the libraries are actually located (that .m2 directory from about 70 steps ago) and add those as an “additional classpath”.
  110. Nope.  Same error.  Back to google to celebrate hour number 5 of hello world setup.
  111. I have no luck for a while and then decide to re-read that last link and see that after line 3 it says “if you want to add the contents of a whole directory, you can click the ‘Add All in Directory’ button”.  Silly me, I just would have assumed the classpath would already have meant this or else it would have been the classfile.  I delete my useless “directory with no children” entry and opt instead for the option whose existence makes sense.
  112. I try again and all errors but one disappear.
  113.  That seems like progress until I see that the single error says “Ant build completed with 86 errors and one warning” and provides me with a single stack trace and no information beyond “compile failed”.  Sweet.
  114. I run the IDE compiler to see if that works.  It does, but I don’t know how much that tells me since it seems to ‘work’ even when there are red squigglies.
  115. I spot inspect the files, but it doesn’t seem to have changed any of them this time, so I suppose the IDE compile is really working.
  116. I re-run Ant and the missing springframework exceptions re-appear.  Two steps forward, two steps back.
  117. I add one of the child directories containing an actual JAR, in case Ant/IntelliJ have yet to discover directory recursion, but that doesn’t seem to help.
  118. At this point, I decide to concede defeat for the night because it’s late and I’m tired.  The good news is that I’m probably about half done with my project — I imagine that actually writing all of the code for the application can’t be anywhere near as difficult as setting up the development environment.  Once you’ve configured Java, writing applications in it is probably a walk in the park. I’m reminded of Rational Clear Case in that perhaps it makes sense to have experts that specialize in falling on this setup grenade so that developers are freed up to actually develop code instead of doing what I’m doing. (As an aside, if I were doing this work for a client, it would have made economic sense to pay someone up to $1000 to set all of this up for me.)
  119. I’ve been somewhat busy, so two weeks have actually passed between steps 118 and now, but in terms of raw time I’m at 5 hours, 30 minutes and counting to get Hello World (or anything at all) going.
  120. First step coming back, I googled the error message Ant was reporting and found a stack overflow post asking for help.  No answers.  Gave a sympathy upvote and moved on.
  121. I expand the “compile” node in the output, even though it has no error indication and discover that it’s littered with errors.  I think I’m partially an idiot for not checking that sooner but think that the tool needs to meet me halfway by not collapsing dozens of errors and having their section header look like everything is fine.  Still, now I’m in business.
  122. All of the errors seem to be about packages and stereotypes not existing, so I suspect it’s something to do with Maven (which, for the life of me I can’t figure out why this isn’t worse than nothing).
  123. More googling and I find this post, which tells me that I maybe need to do something with the class path as I was flirting with back in step 111.  I’m not going to follow accepted answer though because it wants a lot of things and there has to be a less stupid way to do this than redundantly adding all of these definitions to the actual Ant file.
  124. I look at the settings and see there’s a bunch of checkboxes next to the Dependencies in Module->Daedalus-> Dependencies and they aren’t checked.  I check them.  It doesn’t make a difference, so I put them back.
  125. I go into the ant build properties and exhaustively add the actual jars, but that doesn’t matter.  Still errors.  I delete everything in there.
  126. I go under the Ant properties execution and tell it to use a different JDK.  Doesn’t matter, same result.
  127. Back to google, but I don’t really find anything after 5 or 10 minutes.
  128. I start poking around settings randomly.  I try adding the Maven repository root directory to my classpath.  Nope.  I celebrate the start of hours 6 of hello world with that unsurprising failure.
  129. I try adding the MongoDB driver explicitly to the classpath.  Doesn’t help.
  130. Deciding I have nothing to lose, I go scorched Earth and choose Build->Generate Ant Build.  After doing that, it adds a few new XML files to the project.  This doesn’t help my existing build run any better, so I remove it as an Ant build from the Ant window.
  131. I add the one that IntelliJ created and theirs only has two errors, which is some sort of rather sad progress, I suppose.  I also take solace in the fact that even IntelliJ doesn’t know how to generate an Ant build and they’re experts.
  132. Time for baby steps.  I run “clean” and that works.  Huzzah!  Init also runs without errors.  I run “build.modules”.  Doh!
  133. I get an error about IntelliJ not being able to find its own ant definition file.  Apparently I’m not alone.  In the world of setting up Java, just finding someone else that has the same error as me is a huge win – an actual proposed solution is like Shangri-La.  In this case, the problem is apparently that ${idea.home} is not defined.  Oh, of course — as the question asker points out after hearing the answer, he should have known to check a checkbox that was unchecked by default, as I should have too!  /sarcasm (As a brief aside, I think that this sort of thing epitomizes an Emperor’s New Clothes paradigm in programming where we’re afraid to point out that there might be benefits in simplification because we don’t want to appear as though we aren’t clever or knowledgeable.)
  134. Not knowing how to make this ‘obvious’ correction, I delete the whole build and regenerate it.  Success!  Woohoo!!!  There were no other defaults I needed to magically know to override.  Happy Day!  Finally, after 6 hours and 20 minutes, I have an application compiling both in the IDE and with the strangely separate build engine!
  135. Now time to put my build.xml targets into this new ant build and see if I can make the magic happen.  There are actually two ant build files, for some reason, and the targets seem to be spread out sort of randomly across them.
  136. I start adding all of my stuff from my old build into the new build and run it, and then I get all of the same errors.  Time to take baby steps again.  First, I go back to the known build that was running.
  137. First I define all of my custom properties, and that seems to work, so I add a path definition from that file, and that seems to work too.
  138. I then add the war target, and run it, and that works.  Woohoo!!!  I’m building a WAR file.  Almost there.
  139. Now, it’s building it in the wrong directory for some reason.  I hard code the directory name and give that a try.  That works.  I’ll figure out why my variable scheme didn’t port over later.  I want to keep going while I’m on a roll.
  140. I copy over the “start tomcat” and “run chrome” targets to see if I can run my web app.  Doh!  Doesn’t like the directory variables here either.  So, more hardcoding.
  141. That works and tomcat starts, but it can’t find chrome… forgot to hardcode that as well, so I do and then everything runs, and I get a 404!!  (I’m not being sarcastic — I’m delighted that everything at least compiles and deploys).
  142. When I look at the tomcat webapps directory, I see that the war is being generated and it’s being unpacked, but that it has actual Java files and no classpath/lib.  So, there’s something wrong with the actual packing of the WAR.  As I investigate, I see that the lib directory is empty and that so are some other key directories.  I realize that this is because the old Eclipse structure for ouptut was different than what I have now, so I reconfigure the war target, setting the classes directory appropriately.
  143. That works, and when I re-run, I see my default JSP page in the browser, which is definitely a win.  None of the controller links work, but I’m getting tantalizingly close.
  144. I see that the main problem I have now is my lib directory not being populated with my JAR dependencies.    I googled around for a while and found this page and decided to add an “artifact” with my dependencies for deployment rather than manully dropping a bunch of jars into my “lib” folder for deployment, which seems redundant and brittle.
  145. After doing this, the settings window pops back open once for each dependency I had, which seemed screwy.  I’m not optimistic about this working and I’m prescient because it doesn’t.
  146. After playing around in the settings some more, I see that I can move my libraries, so I figure I’ll move them to the lib folder.  I try that and the window starts showing me errors, so I cancel.  Unfortunately, the cancel seems only to have sort of canceled.  I now have an error left that I have to troubleshoot.  Back to google.
  147. I google around and can’t find anything, so I try  just deleting the offending library.  That seems to work and everything still builds.  Ah, the mysteries of life…
  148. After wasting another 15 minutes or so, I’m getting less picky about redundancy.  I decide to copy the jars manually to Web-Inf/lib, but apparently the IDE can only handle this one at a time, so I have to laboriously do it for each one with a right click rather than doing them all together.  /Sigh
  149. Upon further review, I don’t think that did what I thought it would.  It just created a blank module name in that same screen.  Nothing should ever be this convoluted and counter-intuitive.  I want to copy a file.  Only the java world could make this a task that requires a PhD.  Back to google.
  150. After a while, I just decide to give up and manually copy all of the dependencies in that stupid directory.  I was dissuaded all along from doing this because (1) it’s astronomically stupid that you should have to, (2) it’s redundant information, (3) it’s a huge PITA since all of the jars are in their own folders several levels deep and (4) did I mention how incredibly stupid it is that you should have to do it when the IDE already knows about both folders?
  151. I do find and try following the process here but the options in IntelliJ are different now, so this handy-dandy 10 step process for copying files is no longer accurate.  No doubt they’ve improved it to take 23 steps.
  152. Halfway through doing the manual copy, I just can’t bring myself to continue doing something this stupid, so I stop, celebrating the 7th hour of Java hello world with a soda break.
  153. Coming back and doing a lot of googling, I find  this site.  This is a three step process for copying the Jars where step 2 is “Copy the Jars”.  Of course!  /Facepalm.  But I do pick up the interesting tidbit here that this is not the proper, Maven way to do things.  That is, perhaps I shouldn’t have a Web-Inf/lib folder after all.  I tried following the link from that site to the Maven FAQ, but it might as well have been Greek for all the sense it made to me.  I am not “confident” with Maven, so apparently I can ‘conveniently’ use the command line to do God-knows-what.  If that massive parameter-list command line is the convenient option, I think the inconvenient option will probably break my spirit.
  154. I do some more googling for things like “IntelliJ Maven Web-Inf Lib” and lots of IntelliJ bug reports came up.  From using it, I like IntelliJ and the Jetbrains people are sharp.  The only possible conclusion I can formulate the further I get into this is that Maven is a complete train wreck of an implementation however good it might be in theory.
  155. More googling and I find this site.  It doesn’t help me in any way, but the post’s title, “Set up a maven web project in Intellij with Spring and JPA – Part Six” seems somehow perfect to me.  Notice the “part six”.  How many blog posts are required for hello world?  Perhaps his 155 and counting steps are simply distributed into 6 posts of a more manageable 25 step each.  Anyway, a bit of levity for the 7:30 mark.
  156. I found this wiki, which seems to indicate that this would all be much less comically difficult in the Ultimate edition.  Somehow, I’m not intersted in giving money to anyone that has anything to do with this.
  157. After another 20 minutes of fruitless googling, I bite the bullet and do the manual copy.  It only actually takes about 5 minutes, but I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that the IDE knows exactly where these JAR files are on the disk and exactly where my lib folder is, and yet the only way to get those files into that folder is for me to open up two explorer windows and copy/paste all the jars.  The mind boggles.
  158. It works!!!  Hello World (or really, just anything) up and running in just 8 hours with 158 easy steps!!!  It’s like


Setting up for Microsoft Web Development in Many, Many Fewer and Actually Easy Steps

Here are  the steps I followed for Microsoft’s ASP MVC:

  1. Downloaded and installed Visual Studio.
  2. Went to File->New Project and chose ASP MVC project (“Internet Application” template).
  3. Hit F5.

Yep. That’s it.

Threats To Validity

Is this a fair assessment? I’d like to address a few points that I can imagine people raising. First, while it’s true that I’ve been doing a lot of .NET development over the last few years and not much Java development, the overwhelming majority of that work has been desktop development in WPF and a bit of Webforms, so that gives me no experience setting up an ASP MVC project, which means I actually have more experience setting up Java web projects than ASP MVC projects (though a lot has no doubt changed in the last few years).

Another consideration is that I’m using the Community version of IntelliJ instead of the paid version of IntelliJ or using Eclipse. These are valid points, though with Eclipse, it’s been my experience that things are no less of a headache to configure. I also feel as though this is not a significant mitigating factor because of the sheer number of tutorials I encountered for both Eclipse and IntelliJ that had half a dozen or more different posts in sequence for “getting started with web development” or some such thing. As for the paid version of IntelliJ or anything else, there would be a high degree of irony to needing to pay for something in the Java world that you get for free from Microsoft.

Finally, and perhaps most up for debate is whether or not I’m just an idiot (or at least too much of a “noob” to figure things out). Perhaps I just don’t have the programmer chops to do something that an expert could have done quickly. I fully acknowledge that this could be argued (and I’d love anyone to give me time saving tips for next time), but I’d say it misses the point that I’m trying to make here. And that point is that an extremely complicated setup discourages adoption and use. I’m an experienced, polyglot developer that has previous web development experience (even if I am also an idiot), including J2EE experience, and it takes me 8 hours over several weekends to get this going. Imagine how it might go for someone new to web development or just development in general. They’ll try to set things up, get frustrated, look for web tutorials and see things like “Getting started with Java/Spring/etc part 22”. Their next step will be to download Visual Studio and start an ASP project or to download Apache start writing PHP.

Take-Aways

Part of the beauty of Java and its stack of FOSS technologies is that it’s an alternative to Microsoft’s “golden coffin”. You have tooling options for everything you might want to do. Choose your web server, your IDE, your IoC container, your web framework, your runtime, your development kit version, etc. And not just that, but you can mix and match versions. Nobody tells you the ‘right’ way to do things — you can pick all of the options that work for you.

However, it’s important to recognize that this incredible flexibility is great for someone already immersed in these technologies, but daunting and discouraging to someone who isn’t. To this person, it’s pure, confusing fragmentation. Someone who wants to write a hello world app is going to say “what do you mean Ant v1.2.3 doesn’t work with Maven v4.5.6 and JUnit 7.8.9 on windows — I don’t even really know what those things are, I just want hello world!”

Something I’ve noticed that results from this too is that developers come to view understanding how to navigate this setup minefield as a badge of honor. Somewhere in the Java setup steps, I referred to this as “Emperor’s New Clothes” kind of tolerance for complexity. Everyone immersed in the world is afraid to call something out as byzantine and convoluted for fear of being labeled a newbie or lacking chops. But having battle scars from spending weeks configuring a development technology time and time again isn’t a badge of honor — it’s indicative of a problem in tooling.

Now that I have Java set up and finally working, I’m actually excited. I love developing in it. I like the language, I like the choices that I have with it, I love IntelliJ as a tool, and I like that I can work on any OS I choose. But I don’t think we need to settle for this horrendous “hello world” experience to have customizability. I would love to see work done on something that preserves all of the flexibility and power but allows developers to go to a site, download something, and then have a working java web setup. Something that has roughly the same number of steps and complexity of the Microsoft process (or the PHP process, which would be pretty close) would be ideal and perhaps even essential. In a world where the competition offers setup ease that allows developers to be up, productive and tweaking in minutes, a confusing process that spans hours or even days is a sure path to irrelevance and obsolescence. Maybe this already exists (and please someone correct me if I’m just not aware of it — seriously, I’d love it), but it seems doubtful given the number of entire series of posts dedicated to basic setup. If it doesn’t exist, it ought to, and not to stop me from grousing but for the future of the technology stack.

By the way, if you liked this post and you're new here, check out this page as a good place to start for more content that you might enjoy.

By

FeedPaper is Born!

As of Thursday, 11/02/12, a baby ASP MVC project named FeedPaper (later to be feedpapyr.us) has arrived. It is healthy and weights 0 pounds and 0 ounces. Both it and I are doing well, and while it does not yet have much in the way of functionality, it does have its father’s logo and some functional unit tests. (As an aside and leaving this strained metaphor, I’ve never really understood why the weight of babies is announced to me as if someone were trying to sell me a ham — what do I care how much anyone weighs? It’s always tempting for me to respond by saying, “big deal – I totally weigh more than that.”)

Anyway, you can find the source for it on Github. As I mentioned in a previous post, the main thing that I’m interested in is getting this thing up and running, so I’m happy to accept pull requests, suggestions, help, and anything else you’re willing to offer. The plan is to get it going as a website and then perhaps later port the presentation portion of it to phone/tablet implementations as well. But, no sense putting the cart before the horse — I have to figure out ASP MVC 4 first.

So, look for sporadic work on this when I have time and feel like tinkering and am not working on home automation with Java and MongoDB. I will also make posts here and there about lessons I learn as I ham-fist my way through it, talking about my experiences with the frameworks and toolsets involved. Also, in general, I’m looking for the best options for hosting the site, so suggestions are welcome (should I try out Azure, go a more traditional route, etc).

Cheers!

By

TDD For Breaking Problems Apart 3: Finishing Up

Last time, we left off with a bowling score calculator that handled basic score calculation with the exception of double strikes and the tenth frame. Here is the code as of right now for both classes:

[TestClass]
public class BowlingTest
{
    [TestClass]
    public class Constructor
    {

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Initializes_Score_To_Zero()
        {
            var scoreCalculator = new BowlingScoreCalculator();

            Assert.AreEqual(0, scoreCalculator.Score);
        }
    }

    [TestClass]
    public class BowlFrame
    {
        private static BowlingScoreCalculator Target { get; set; }

        [TestInitialize()]
        public void BeforeEachTest()
        {
            Target = new BowlingScoreCalculator();
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void With_Throws_0_And_1_Results_In_Score_1()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(0, 1);
            Target.BowlFrame(frame);

            Assert.AreEqual(frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow, Target.Score);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void With_Throws_2_And_3_Results_In_Score_5()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(2, 3);
            Target.BowlFrame(frame);

            Assert.AreEqual(frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow, Target.Score);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Sets_Score_To_2_After_2_Frames_With_Score_Of_1_Each()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(1, 0);
            Target.BowlFrame(frame);
            Target.BowlFrame(frame);

            Assert.AreEqual(frame.Total + frame.Total, Target.Score);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Sets_Score_To_Twenty_After_Spare_Then_Five_Then_Zero()
        {
            var firstFrame = new Frame(9, 1);
            var secondFrame = new Frame(5, 0);

            Target.BowlFrame(firstFrame);
            Target.BowlFrame(secondFrame);

            Assert.AreEqual(20, Target.Score);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Sets_Score_To_25_After_Strike_Then_Five_Five()
        {
            var firstFrame = new Frame(10, 0);
            var secondFrame = new Frame(6, 4);

            Target.BowlFrame(firstFrame);
            Target.BowlFrame(secondFrame);

            Assert.AreEqual(30, Target.Score);
        }
    }
}

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private readonly Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    private Frame LastFrame { get { return _frames[_currentFrame - 1]; } }

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        AddMarkBonuses(frame);

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }

    private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
    {
        if (WasLastFrameAStrike()) Score += frame.Total;
        else if (WasLastFrameASpare()) Score += frame.FirstThrow;
    }

    private bool WasLastFrameAStrike()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsStrike;
    }
    private bool WasLastFrameASpare()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsSpare;
    }
}
[TestClass]
public class FrameTest
{
    [TestClass]
    public class Constructor
    {
        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Initializes_FirstThrow_To_Passed_In_Value()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(1, 0);

            Assert.AreEqual(1, frame.FirstThrow);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Initializes_SecondThrow_To_Passed_In_Value()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(0, 1);

            Assert.AreEqual(1, frame.SecondThrow);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Throws_Exception_On_Negative_Argument()
        {
            ExtendedAssert.Throws(() => new Frame(-1, 0));
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Throws_Exception_On_Score_Of_11()
        {
            ExtendedAssert.Throws(() => new Frame(Frame.Mark, 1));
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Initializes_Total_To_FirstThrow_Plus_SecondThrow()
        {
            const int firstThrow = 4;
            const int secondThrow = 3;

            Assert.AreEqual(firstThrow + secondThrow, new Frame(firstThrow, secondThrow).Total);
        }
    }

    [TestClass]
    public class IsStrike
    {
        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Returns_True_When_Frame_Has_10_For_First_Throw()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(10, 0);
            Assert.IsTrue(frame.IsStrike);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Returns_False_When_Frame_Does_Not_Have_10_For_First_Throw()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(0, 2);
            Assert.IsFalse(frame.IsStrike);
        }
    }

    [TestClass]
    public class IsSpare
    {
        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Returns_True_When_Frame_Totals_Mark()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(4, 6);

            Assert.IsTrue(frame.IsSpare);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Returns_False_When_Frame_Does_Not_Total_10()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(0, 9);
            Assert.IsFalse(frame.IsSpare);
        }

        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Returns_False_When_Frame_Is_Strike()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(10, 0);
            Assert.IsFalse(frame.IsSpare);
        }
    }
}

public class Frame
{
    public class UnderflowException : Exception { }

    public class OverflowException : Exception { }

    public const int Mark = 10;

    public int FirstThrow { get; private set; }

    public int SecondThrow { get; private set; }

    public int Total { get { return FirstThrow + SecondThrow; } }

    public bool IsStrike { get { return FirstThrow == Frame.Mark; } }

    public bool IsSpare { get { return !IsStrike && Total == Frame.Mark; } }

    public Frame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        if (firstThrow < 0 || secondThrow < 0)
            throw new UnderflowException();
        if (firstThrow + secondThrow > Mark)
            throw new OverflowException();

        FirstThrow = firstThrow;
        SecondThrow = secondThrow;
    }
}

Without further ado, let’s get back to work. The first thing I’d like to do is actually a refactor. I think it would be more expressive when creating strikes to use a static property, Frame.Strike, rather than new Frame(10, 0). Since the strike is completely specific in nature and a named case, I think this approach makes sense. So the first thing that I’m going to do is test that it returns a frame where IsStrike is true:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Returns_Frame_With_Is_Strike_True()
{
    Assert.IsTrue(Frame.Strike.IsStrike);
}

(This is actually what the test looked like after two red-green-refactors, since the first one was just to define Frame.Strike). At this point, I now have a static property that I can use and I’m going to find everywhere in my score calculator and frame test classes that I queued up a strike and use that instead as part of this refactor cycle. While I’m at it, I also demote the visibility of Frame.Mark, since I realize I should have done that a while ago. The Mark constant isn’t needed outside of Frame since Frame is now expressive with IsStrike, IsSpare and Total. Strictly speaking, I should conceive of some test to write that will fail if Mark is visible outside of the class, but I try to be pragmatic, and that’s a screwy test to have and persist.

Now, let’s get down to brass tacks and fix the double strike issue. If I bowl a strike in the first frame, another in the second frame, and then a 9 in the third frame, my total score should be 57 in the third (29+19+9). Let’s write such a test:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_57_After_Two_Strikes_And_A_Nine()
{
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(9, 0));

    Assert.AreEqual(57, Target.Score);
}

How to get this to pass… well, I’ll just tack on an extra frame.FirstThrow if the last two were strikes:

private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
{
    if (_currentFrame > 1 && LastFrame.IsStrike && _frames[_currentFrame - 2].IsStrike)
        Score += frame.Total;

    if (WasLastFrameAStrike()) 
        Score += frame.Total;
    else if (WasLastFrameASpare()) 
        Score += frame.FirstThrow;
}

… and NCrunch gives me green. Now, let’s make the class a little nicer to look at:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private readonly Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    private Frame LastFrame { get { return _frames[_currentFrame - 1]; } }

    private Frame TwoFramesAgo { get { return _frames[_currentFrame - 2]; } }

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        AddMarkBonuses(frame);

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }

    private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
    {
        if (WereLastTwoFramesStrikes())
            Score += 2 * frame.Total;
        else if (WasLastFrameAStrike()) 
            Score += frame.Total;
        else if (WasLastFrameASpare()) 
            Score += frame.FirstThrow;
    }

    private bool WereLastTwoFramesStrikes()
    {
        return WasLastFrameAStrike() && _currentFrame > 1 && TwoFramesAgo.IsStrike;
    }

    private bool WasLastFrameAStrike()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsStrike;
    }
    private bool WasLastFrameASpare()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsSpare;
    }
}

And, that’s that. Now we have to think about the 10th frame. This is going to be interesting because the 10th frame is completely different in concept than the other frames. The 10th frame’s total can range up to 30 instead of being capped at 10, and if you get a strike in the first frame or spare in the second frame, you get three throws instead of two. How to model this with what we have… add a new property to the frame class called “ThirdThrow”? That seems reasonable, but what if we populate the third throw when we’re not in the 10th frame? That’s no good — how can we know that a frame is a 10th frame? We’ll probably need a boolean property called IsTenthFrame… right?

Wrong! (At least in my opinion). That amounts to adding a flag that clients look at to know how to treat the object. If the flag is set to true, we treat it like one kind of object and if it’s set to false, we treat it like another kind. This is a code smell in my opinion — one that I think of as “polymorphism envy” or “poor man’s polymorphism”. This is a milder version of the kind you usually see which is some ObjectType enum that clients switch over. We don’t have that (yet) because we only have two values.

So if we’re contemplating a polymorphism envy approach, it stands to reason that maybe what we’re nibbling at is, well, actual polymorphism. Maybe we should have a TenthFrame class that derives from Frame and overrides important functionality. I don’t know that this is the solution, but TDD is about solving small problems incrementally, so let’s start down this path and see where it leads. We don’t need all of the answers this minute. The first thing to test is probably going to be that total is the sum of the three constructor arguments:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Initializes_Total_To_Sum_Of_Three_Throws()
{
    const int firstThrow = 1;
    const int secondThrow = 2;
    const int thirdThrow = 3;
    var frame = new TenthFrame(firstThrow, secondThrow, thirdThrow);

    Assert.AreEqual(firstThrow + secondThrow + thirdThrow, frame.Total);
}

As I wrote this test, two things didn’t compile. The first was the instantiation of the TenthFrame, which I solved by declaring it. The second was the Total property, which I solved by inheriting from Frame. That actually turned out to be an easier way to get a red test than declaring the property (and more productive toward our design). Then to get the test passing, the easiest thing to do was make Frame’s total virtual and override it in TenthFrame. So, pretty quickly we seem to be getting Total right:

public class TenthFrame : Frame
{
    public int ThirdThrow { get; private set; } 

    public override int Total { get { return base.Total + ThirdThrow; }  }

    public TenthFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow, int thirdThrow) : base(firstThrow, secondThrow)
    {
        ThirdThrow = thirdThrow;
    }
}

Now we need to start tweaking the business rules. Parent is going to throw an exception if we initialize frame 1 and 2 each to a strike, but that’s fine in the 10th frame. Here’s a failing test:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Does_Not_Throw_Exception_On_Two_Strikes()
{
    ExtendedAssert.DoesNotThrow(() => new TenthFrame(10, 10, 9));
}

To get this passing, I declare a default constructor in the base (to make the compiler happy) and have the new class’s constructor implement its own assignment logic to avoid the checks in parent that cause this failure. But now that simple assignment is restored, we need to implement our own rules, which will include throwing exceptions for throws greater than ten or less than zero, but it will also include oddballs like this that I don’t yet know how to describe:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Throws_Exception_For_5_10_5()
{
    ExtendedAssert.Throws(() => new TenthFrame(5, 10, 5));
}

This is another one of the real draws of TDD. I don’t know what to call this or how to categorize it, but I have an example, and that’s all I need to get started. I just have to make this pass:

public TenthFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow, int thirdThrow) 
{
    ValidateIndividualThrows(firstThrow, secondThrow, thirdThrow);

    if (firstThrow != Mark && secondThrow + firstThrow > Mark)
        throw new IllegalFrameException();

    FirstThrow = firstThrow;
    SecondThrow = secondThrow;
    ThirdThrow = thirdThrow;
}

I could have just tested for the specific literals in the test, but I didn’t feel the need to be that obtuse. You can really control your own destiny somewhat with “simplest thing to make the test pass”. IF you have no idea what direction the design should take, maybe you go that obtuse route. If you have some half-formed idea, as I do here, it’s fine to get a little more business-logic-y. I’m going to dial up another case that should fail because of the relationship between second and third frame and take if from there:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Throws_For_10_5_10()
{
    ExtendedAssert.Throws(() => new TenthFrame(10, 5, 10));
}

Now I have the following production code to get it to pass:

public TenthFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow, int thirdThrow) 
{
    ValidateIndividualThrows(firstThrow, secondThrow, thirdThrow);

    if (firstThrow != Mark && secondThrow + firstThrow > Mark)
        throw new IllegalFrameException();
    if (secondThrow != Mark && thirdThrow + secondThrow > Mark)
        throw new IllegalFrameException();

    FirstThrow = firstThrow;
    SecondThrow = secondThrow;
    ThirdThrow = thirdThrow;
}

But, that’s getting a little fugly, so let’s refactor:

public TenthFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow, int thirdThrow) 
{
    ValidateIndividualThrows(firstThrow, secondThrow, thirdThrow);
    CheckConsecutiveThrows(firstThrow, secondThrow);
    CheckConsecutiveThrows(secondThrow, thirdThrow);

    FirstThrow = firstThrow;
    SecondThrow = secondThrow;
    ThirdThrow = thirdThrow;
}

private static void CheckConsecutiveThrows(int first, int second)
{
    if (first != Mark && first + second > Mark)
        throw new IllegalFrameException();
}

Ah, a business rule is starting to emerge. In general, if a throw is not a mark, then it and the subsequent throw can’t be greater than 10. Hey, come to think of it, that sounds right from my bowling experience. They only reset the pins if you knock ’em all down. Of course, we have one final rule to implement, which is that if the first and second throws don’t knock all the pins down, there is no third throw. I’ll leave that out, since it’s pretty easy.

Now the time has arrived for some integration testing. I found a site that has some example bowling scores, and I’m going to code one up:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void SampleGame_For_Mary()
{
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(9, 0));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(3, 7));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(6, 1));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(3, 7));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(8, 1));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(5, 5));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(0, 10));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(8, 0));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(7, 3));
    Target.BowlFrame(new TenthFrame(8, 2, 8));

    Assert.AreEqual(131, Target.Score);
}

If you’re following along, you’ll see green in NCrunch. Let’s try one more:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void SampleGame_For_Kim()
{
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(3, 7));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(6, 1));
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(Frame.Strike);
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(2, 8));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(9, 0));
    Target.BowlFrame(new Frame(7, 3));
    Target.BowlFrame(new TenthFrame(10, 10, 10));

    Assert.AreEqual(193, Target.Score);
}

Oops. Red. So, what happened? Well, I went back through game, setting temporary asserts until I found that things went off the rails following the third strike in a row. I then looked in my class at the logic following the two strikes and realized it wasn’t quite right:

private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
{
    if (WereLastTwoFramesStrikes())
        Score += frame.Total + frame.FirstThrow;
    //Score += 2 * frame.Total;
    else if (WasLastFrameAStrike())
        Score += frame.Total;
    else if (WasLastFrameASpare())
        Score += frame.FirstThrow;
}

I commented out the mistake and put in the correct code, and the entire test suite went green, including the integration test for Kim. I think this is a good note to close on because the tests are all passing and I believe the calculator is functioning (here it is on gist if you want to check out the final product) but also because I think there’s a valuable point here.

TDD is a design methodology — not a guarantee of bug free code/comprehensive testing strategy. I experienced and even blogged about writing code for days using TDD and assembling all the parts and having it work flawlessly the first time, and that did happen. But I realized that even with that, the happy and happy-ish paths were the ones that worked. Here, I had a bowling calculator that made it through all individual scoring tests and even an entire non-trivial game going green before we teased out a case in smoke testing where it went red.

TDD will help you break problems into small pieces to solve (the whole point of this series of posts), ensure that your code is testable and thus loosely coupled and modular, ensure that you don’t push dirty mop water around the floor by breaking functionality that you had working before, and generally promote good code. But think about this — those are all productive programming concerns rather than testing concerns. You still need testers, you still need edge case unit tests once you’re done with TDD, and you still need integration/smoke tests. The fact that TDD produces a lot of tests that you can check in and continue to use is really just a bonus.

And it’s a bonus that keeps on giving. Because let’s say that you don’t agree with my decision to use inheritance for tenth frame or you think strike would be a more appropriate descriptor of a throw than of a frame. With all of my TDD test artifacts (and the integration tests) in place, you can rip my internal design to pieces without worrying that you’re going to break the functionality that this provides to clients. And that’s incredibly powerful for allowing fearless refactoring and maintenance of this code. So do it to break your problems apart and keep yourself moving and productive, and keep the tests around to make sure the code stays clean and trends toward improvement rather than rot.

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TDD For Breaking Problems Apart 2: Magic Boxes

In the last post, I started a TDD exploration of the “bowling score” code kata. Today, I’m going to build a “magic box” in the course of TDD to solve the problem that arose at the end of the post with the scoring class doing too much.

Last time, we left off with production code that looked like this:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    public const int Mark = 10;

    public class FrameUnderflowException : Exception { }

    public class FrameOverflowException : Exception { }

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        if (firstThrow < 0 || secondThrow < 0)
            throw new FrameUnderflowException();
        else if (firstThrow + secondThrow > Mark)
            throw new FrameOverflowException();

        Score += firstThrow + secondThrow;
    }
}

And the last test we had written looked like this:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_2_After_2_Frames_With_Score_Of_1_Each()
{
    Target.BowlFrame(1, 0);
    Target.BowlFrame(1, 0);

    Assert.AreEqual(2, Target.Score);
}

I had noticed that the amount of integer literals here seemed to be a bit of a smell and was starting to wrap my head around the idea of what to do about it from a design perspective. Specifically, the smell in question is “primitive obsession,” a tendency to overuse primitive types, often redundantly, due to reluctance to make an object. So what if we made an object — a frame object — what would that look like?

Looking at the BowlFrame() method, I think “what if I had a magic box that handled frame operations?” Well, the method would take a frame object and presumably that object would handle validating the individual throws, so the method would lose that exception handling logic (and the class would probably lose those exception definitions). It would probably also make sense for the frame to encapsulate some kind of totaling mechanism internally so that the score calculator didn’t need to inspect its properties to figure out what to add.

At this point, though, I’m going to stop and start coding up the frame class as I envision it. After the first test (including a couple of non-compile failures and passes prior to the test run failure), this is what the frame test and production code looks like:

[TestClass]
public class FrameTest
{
    [TestClass]
    public class Constructor
    {
        [TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
        public void Initializes_FirstThrow_To_Passed_In_Value()
        {
            var frame = new Frame(1, 0);

            Assert.AreEqual(1, frame.FirstThrow);
        }
    }
}

public class Frame
{
    public int FirstThrow { get; private set; }

    public Frame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        FirstThrow = firstThrow;
    }
}

The first thing I do at this point is refactor the test to eliminate the magic numbers and duplication. At this point, you might wonder why, having done this enough times, I don’t simply start out by leaving out the magic numbers and duplication. Am I obtuse? Well, sometimes, but the reason I often don’t bother with this is that I want the test I’m writing to be the simplest possible thing as I perceive it for problem solving purposes — not necessarily the quickest and certainly not the cleanest. I wouldn’t ever purposefully make a mess, but if calling the frame constructor with (1, 0) seems more intuitive to me, then that’s what I do. I encourage you to do the same. Simplicity as you perceive it is of the utmost importance writing the failing test. Whatever it is, make it pretty and elegant later.

The next thing I do is add a similar test and then code for the second throw, with similar green and refactor. With that in place, I move the exception handling tests from the ScoreCalculator test class to the Frame test class and change them to operate on Frame’s constructor. When I do this, I get a red test, which I make green by porting the exception handling code and constants over to the new Frame class. The production code is now:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        Score += firstThrow + secondThrow;
    }
}

public class Frame
{
    public class UnderflowException : Exception { }

    public class OverflowException : Exception { }

    public const int Mark = 10;

    public int FirstThrow { get; private set; }

    public int SecondThrow { get; private set; }

    public Frame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        if (firstThrow < 0 || secondThrow < 0)
            throw new UnderflowException();
        if (firstThrow + secondThrow > Mark)
            throw new OverflowException();

        FirstThrow = firstThrow;
        SecondThrow = secondThrow;
    }
}

I’m happy that all of that logic about determining what constitutes a valid frame is now out of the BowlingScoreCalculator class, but it’s not yet sitting inside of a magic box — it’s just gone. So, let’s give the calculator the box that it’s looking for. We’re going to need a failing test, and the easiest way to do that is to change a test where we’re bowling a frame to look like this:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void With_Throws_0_And_1_Results_In_Score_1()
{
    var frame = new Frame(0, 1);
    Target.BowlFrame(frame);

    Assert.AreEqual(frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow, Target.Score);
}

That doesn’t compile, so we can fix the broken test by adding this method in production:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(int firstThrow, int secondThrow)
    {
        Score += firstThrow + secondThrow;
    }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        BowlFrame(frame.FirstThrow, frame.SecondThrow);
    }
}

At this point, we can refactor the rest of the tests to use the second method and then refactor that method to inline the original method and now the score calculator only accepts frames. There’s our magic box. Suddenly, we’re just worrying about how to add the scores from the frame’s throws and not whether the frame we’re being passed is valid or not. And that makes sense — we shouldn’t care about the anatomy of a frame in a class responsible for adding up and tracking frames. We should be able to assume that if the frame exists and is being handed to us that it’s valid.

Now that this bigger refactoring is done, there’s still something a little fishy. Look at this test and production code for the calculator:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_2_After_2_Frames_With_Score_Of_1_Each()
{
    var frame = new Frame(1, 0);
    Target.BowlFrame(frame);
    Target.BowlFrame(frame);

    Assert.AreEqual(frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow + frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow, Target.Score);
}

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        Score += frame.FirstThrow + frame.SecondThrow;
    }
}

We’ve fixed our primitive obsession, but there sure seems to be a lot of redundancy. I mean I have to ask frame for two things in the production code and four things in the test: two for each frame. What if I had a magic box that turned those two things into one? What would that look like? Well, here’s a test I can write against frame that I think will tell me:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Initializes_Total_To_FirstThrow_Plus_SecondThrow()
{
    const int firstThrow = 4;
    const int secondThrow = 3;

    Assert.AreEqual(firstThrow + secondThrow, new Frame(firstThrow, secondThrow).Total);
}

Now I just need to define that property as the sum of my two throws to make it pass. I do that, and now I can refactor my score calculator and test. Here’s what it looks like now:

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_2_After_2_Frames_With_Score_Of_1_Each()
{
    var frame = new Frame(1, 0);
    Target.BowlFrame(frame);
    Target.BowlFrame(frame);

    Assert.AreEqual(frame.Total + frame.Total, Target.Score);
}

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        Score += frame.Total;
    }
}

Now, all of the frame stuff is removed from score calculation and those concerns are separated. The “magic box,” Frame, handles evaluating frames for validity and totaling them up. This score calculator class is actually starting to smell like a lazy class that could be replaced with a list and a call to a Linq extension method, but I’m going to keep it around on a hunch.

Okay, now that we’ve done a good bit of cleanup and pulled out a magic box, time to get back to implementing features. Off the top of my head, I can think of two scenarios that we don’t currently handle: the 10th frame and marks carrying over from previous frames. I’m going to work on the latter for now and write a test that when I bowl a spare in the first frame and a 5, 0 in the second frame, my score should be 20 instead of 15.

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_Twenty_After_Spare_Then_Five_Then_Zero()
{
    var firstFrame = new Frame(9, 1);
    var secondFrame = new Frame(5, 0);

    Target.BowlFrame(firstFrame);
    Target.BowlFrame(secondFrame);

    Assert.AreEqual(20, Target.Score);
}

This test fails and I need to get it to pass. There are no trivial tricks I can do, but I will do the simplest thing I can think of. I’ll store an array, write frames to it, and check last frame to know when to handle this case. Here is the simplest thing I can think of that makes this pass:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        if (_currentFrame > 0 && _frames[_currentFrame - 1].Total == Frame.Mark)
            Score += frame.FirstThrow;

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }
}

That’s pretty ugly though, so let’s clean it up at least a little before we move on. Boy Scout Rule and all that:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        if (WasLastFrameAMark())
            Score += frame.FirstThrow;

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }

    private bool WasLastFrameAMark()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && _frames[_currentFrame - 1].Total == Frame.Mark;
    }
}

Now the method is semantically clearer than it was with all of that crap in the guard condition. If the last frame was a mark, do something different with this frame, and then do our normal score augmentation and frame recording. We might decide to do some reasoning at this point about whether score should be computed as frames are added or only on demand, but that’s a little nitpicky, so let’s instead focus on the fact that this doesn’t score strikes correctly. So we’ll write a test in which we bowl a strike in the first frame and then a (6, 4) in the second frame and assert that the score should be 30 (unlike the current implementation, which would make it 26):

[TestMethod, Owner("ebd"), TestCategory("Proven"), TestCategory("Unit")]
public void Sets_Score_To_25_After_Strike_Then_Five_Five()
{
    var firstFrame = new Frame(10, 0);
    var secondFrame = new Frame(6, 4);

    Target.BowlFrame(firstFrame);
    Target.BowlFrame(secondFrame);

    Assert.AreEqual(30, Target.Score);
}

And, let’s fix the code:

public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
{
    if (_currentFrame > 0 && _frames[_currentFrame - 1].FirstThrow == Frame.Mark)
        Score += frame.Total;
    else if (WasLastFrameAMark())
        Score += frame.FirstThrow;

    Score += frame.Total;
    _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
}

That makes everyone green, but it’s ugly, so let’s refactor it to this:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private readonly Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        AddMarkBonuses(frame);

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }

    private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
    {
        if (WasLastFrameAStrike())
            Score += frame.Total;
        else if (WasLastFrameASpare())
            Score += frame.FirstThrow;
    }

    private bool WasLastFrameAStrike()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && _frames[_currentFrame - 1].FirstThrow == Frame.Mark;
    }
    private bool WasLastFrameASpare()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && _frames[_currentFrame - 1].Total == Frame.Mark;
    }
}

Now BowlFrame() is starting to read like the actual scoring rules of bowling. “If the last frame was a strike, add current frame’s total points to the score as a bonus. Otherwise, if it was a spare, add the first throw’s points to the score as a bonus. No matter what, add this frame’s pins.” Not too shabby. At this point, before proceeding any further with the score calculator (such as handling double strikes and the 10th frame), I’d like to clean up something I don’t like: the fact that the score class is responsible for figuring out whether a frame is a strike or spare. I’m eliding the details of the tests I wrote for the Frame class to make this happen, but they’re pretty straightforward and I’ll post everything at the end of the series. Here is the new look calculator, after some refactoring:

public class BowlingScoreCalculator
{
    private readonly Frame[] _frames = new Frame[10];

    private int _currentFrame;

    private Frame LastFrame { get { return _frames[_currentFrame - 1]; } }

    public int Score { get; private set; }

    public void BowlFrame(Frame frame)
    {
        AddMarkBonuses(frame);

        Score += frame.Total;
        _frames[_currentFrame++] = frame;
    }

    private void AddMarkBonuses(Frame frame)
    {
        if (WasLastFrameAStrike())
            Score += frame.Total;
        else if (WasLastFrameASpare())
            Score += frame.FirstThrow;
    }

    private bool WasLastFrameAStrike()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsStrike;
    }
    private bool WasLastFrameASpare()
    {
        return _currentFrame > 0 && LastFrame.IsSpare;
    }
}

Next time, I’ll cover the addition of double strike logic and the tenth frame, and I’ll explore some different alternatives that are easily achievable with a nice suite of unit tests backing things up.