Let’s keep the distances

In my last article I mentioned that we had cases when we needed to split our back-end application across several processes and as a result we gained more flexibility when we needed to scale the application. This time I want to keep sharing some insights on why we try to keep some parts of the application loosely coupled. This time I wanted to talk about loose coupling at design time when the whole application might run in the single process. According to one of the definitions ”loosely coupled system is one in which each of its components has, or makes use of, little or no knowledge of the definitions of other separate components”. In object oriented paradigm, that we are using to create our Fitradar application, most of the code is spread among various classes and therefore the smallest component that we consider is a class. And since classes are just containers for data and functions then we usually see the loose coupling as a way how to call a function of another class with little information as possible.

The simplest way how to call a method on the other object is to create that object from a class (in Java and C# we do that by new operator) and call the needed method. But it turns out there are many cases when it is undesirable to know the class name of an object or even a specific method name during the design time and therefore there are several methods how to reduce the knowledge of a class we are going to use and a method we are going to call:

  • We can replace a class with an interface or an abstract class and in such way reduce the information about the class to the subset of methods that the other classes are interested in. In Object Oriented programming this is known as Polymorphism and is one of the OOP cornerstones. It is really hard to express how important this OOP feature is. I think back in a day that feature was one of the selling points of OOP that pushed out the procedural programming. The biggest gain of using Polymorphism is a flexibility. Now we are not bound to a single code execution flow, because every function that is presented in the execution flow via interface or abstract class can be replaced with other implementation through the configuration or dynamically during a runtime. This in turn opens whole bunch of new possibilities. And the one I like the most is Unit testing. Now days it is hard to imagine how much work it would require to isolate the piece of code and test it without the interfaces that can be mocked.
  • Sometimes we are interested only in one method of the other class and we don’t want to be bound to single class that implements this method, and we want to replace that method implementation. In order to reduce the knowledge about the other class to single methods signature we can use delegates in C#, functional interfaces in Java, Kotlin or function pointers in C\C++. Not all OOP languages provide such constructs though then we should use more verbose interfaces or abstract classes. A delegate can bee seen as placeholder for a method. And once we start to focus on a method without accompanying class we start to enter the realm of Functional programming where function implementation can be written as lambda expression (anonymous functions) and its return type and arguments can be other functions. The most common areas where the function placeholders are used are events and callbacks. And once Linq came out everyone who got to know this library really started to appreciate lambda expressions
  • In cases where Interfaces and Anonymous methods are not enough to describe dependency, for example we don’t want to restrict a method description in our execution flow with a single signature and want to use different rules to describe the method or a class that contains the method, then we can use Reflection. Although Reflection is very powerful tool that allows to achieve a great flexibility, usually it is not recommended to use because it adds an overhead at runtime and degrades the performance

On the larger scale where components are not anymore single classes but the whole systems the loose coupling further can be achieved by introducing the middle-ware like Queues and Service Buses.

As we can see making a method call something that is not bound to a single implementation opens up a dozen of options how to design and build an application in very flexible way.

P.S. Visit http://fitradar.me/ and join the mailing list!

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