A Java geek

I recently read and shared You’re Wasting Time in Java Without These 10 Libraries. I commented on it a bit in my newsletter, but given the amount and intensity of reactions, I think a full-blown post is in order.

This week, I received an interesting task: dusting off a legacy Java application. The application analyzes specific XML files in proprietary format. I know XML doesn’t sound sexy to junior developers, but it has an amazing benefit. One can validate a file against a grammar. Such grammar is called an XSD, the acronym for XML Schema Definition. Fun fact: you write XSDs in XML. In this post, I explain the problem, what I tried, and the final working solution.

Fun fact, I thought I had already written this post, but when I wanted to reference it, I found out that I didn’t. In this post, I’d like to describe my approach when choosing a dependency. I’ll first define what I mean by dependency in the context of this post. Then, I’ll list a grid of several criteria to analyze possible dependencies with. What is a dependency?

I taught myself HTML a long time ago, on a software called HotDog (Pro?). There wasn’t such a thing as WYSIWYG capabilities at the time. However, HotDog had an amazing feature: the toolbar had all HTML tags (there weren’t that many at the time) as buttons, and you could learn them by clicking on them and watching the results. The only downside was that you had to click on another button to close the tag. Then came Dreamweaver.

I’m currently working on a software designed more than a decade ago. It offers a plugin architecture: you can develop a plugin whose lifecycle is handled by the software. The tough part, though, is how you access the platform capabilities: via static methods on singletons. @Override public boolean start() { var aService = AService.getInstance(); var anotherService = AnotherService.getInstance(); // Do something with the services var result = ...

In OOP, objects collaborate. The initial idea of collaboration, first found in Smalltalk, was for object A to send a message to object B. Languages designed later use method calling. In both cases, the same question stands: how does an object reference other objects to reach the desired results? In this post, I tackle the problem of passing dependencies to an object. I will go through several options and analyze their respective pros and cons.