Drawing clear lines in software architecture

While reading the web I've stumbled upon an interesting article "Reusable Software? Just Don't Write Generic Code" that instructed:

"Do not introduce an abstraction layer unless it is clear that you will have multiple implementations (YAGNI principle)."

This comes on strong for one important reason:

• it explicitly tells you not to do something, which in my opinion needs strong arguments in software architecture.

Evil interfaces!

According to Jos de Jong introducing an interface for every implementation is bad because:

• it violates YAGNI principle
  it says not to program something, just for the sake of it. Write something only if you are going to need it.
• it violates RAP principle
  it says that adding an interface for every implementation adds "indirection and code clutter, which just makes the code harder to understand"
• it breaks encapsulation
  it exposes external classes to internal implementation.

YAGNI is of course a good and sensible principle, but not something to be followed blindly. The RAP principle description gives you a thesis but no proof. It says that adding an interface for one implementation is bad, but doesn't tell you why - other than it might look bad. It breaks encapsulation, I agree but it's not necessarily bad, which I'll explain later.

What about unit test mocks and dependency injection ? Shouldn't we use interfaces to get these working? According to Jos: not necessarily. He says you can still inject concrete classes and test with concrete implementations, instead of mocks.

but: "When you test that code path with the actual dependency, you are not unit testing; you are integration testing. While that's good and necessary, it isn't unit testing."

That means that if you want to unit test... you have to use mocks (just don't overuse them!)

Well, at least in some languages. In dynamically typed languages like Objective-C you can create stubs and mocks without creating a concrete class (which I strongly advise you to).

Good interfaces!

By injecting concrete classes instead of interfaces you break two of the five very important SOLID principles.

If your project will be maintained for a long time, there's going to be a huge probability that you will need a different implementation for some module you didn't expect. You're going to break the open/close principle and create a nasty code smell by going through every reference to implementation A and changing it by hand to implementation B. 

You also break the dependency inversion principle that says one should "Depend upon Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions".

Sure, you also kind of break the YAGNI rule, but ask yourself, what the lesser of the evils here ? A question you have to ask yourself very often in programming.

Component-based software engineering

Why do we inject interfaces, instead of concretions, even though it introduces code clutter and breaks encapsulation? I've found a great explanation that's hard to argue with on Stackoverflow.

"...When we use IoC/dependency injection, we're not using OOP concepts. Admittedly we're using an OO language as the 'host', but the ideas behind IoC come from component-oriented software engineering, not OO..."

Great out of the box thinking. Of course, we're breaking OO a little bit here, but we don't care, because we're using another concept that's meta OO to have our software modularised.

Lesser evil

So we have extremely contrary points of view on software architecture. The best way out of this mess would be to find common characteristics between all of our modules and abstract their behavior into shared modules (example). You can't always do that, though.

As I said: programming is very often about choosing the lesser of two evils. It's mostly never a clear line like "this is bad", and "this is good". These are just tools, and we have to use them for the right job. How? Experience, time, and patience.

Your code sucks - things you need to know about clean code and architecture

    

 Although the title is an exaggeration, all code I've seen in my (short) professional career did indeed suck. Because it's my first post, it'd be appropriate to talk about something very important to me: code quality. 

I want this post to be something of a quick collection of references for programmers on how can they recognize if their code sucks and how should they try to fix it. I'll avoid getting into details or code examples.

I'd like to say it's targeted to junior programmers, but I know for a fact that there are some senior programmers out there that didn't hear of such basic concepts as Dependency injection or Don't-Repeat-Yourself principle.

Clean up your code, would you ?

I wish I ruled the world and that's just for one selfish reason: force all programmers to read this book. If all developers followed the simple rules described in Clean Code by Robert C. Martin the IT world would be so much nicer.

It would most definitely prevent such classes as Start from being created. It's actually a pretty decent one compared to some other classes on the repo of Polish Electoral Calculator client, which is only... one of the most important programs in the country. 

There are a few basic rules a decent developer should follow:

• Replace comments with meaningful method/variable names. 
  Code should comment itself
• Methods should do one thing and one thing only
• Methods should be very short 
  If a method is longer than 10-30 lines, consider dividing it into separate methods
• Don't keep dead code - your repo is your history, not commented code
• Don't use magic strings and magic numbers
  The only exception I use are log and error mesage strings. It would be tiresome to create a constant for every possible log.
• If a class is very long, consider dividing it
• Don't use snake expressions
  If one expression is long, divide it into several different expressions
• Don't repeat yourself
  If you have two blocks of similiar looking code, it means it probably needs to be put in one method

And probably many more I missed. The point here is: if you didn't know about at least one of these rules, that's more the reason to browse through the book.

My two cents

I find comments and macros very useful when it comes to arranging insides of your file. 

I like to keep my private methods and public methods divided by comments/macros.

I also put comments before every method to put method/parameters/return information for documentation (check out automatic documentation generators for IDE you're using, to see what format to use) and put a clear sign that "this method starts here". When you open the DOOM 3 source files you immediately notice when methods start. Actually, DOOM3 source code is pretty good example of clean code, here's a good blog post about that:" The exceptional bueaty of DOOM 3`s source code".

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” - Someone

Design Patterns

If you're a developer and you've never heard of design patterns, well then better hurry: click.
Even if you find out that you don't like to use design patterns, you have to know them by heart. Why? It has an undeniable advantage: it's a universal language of software architecture.

You are the architect

Your classes are your blocks, your program is your city. The bigger the city, the better architect you have to be to prevent the city from falling apart.

Architecture is a huge chunk of computer software. It's not something you learn in a short blog post. It's also unique for every programming language or kind of program. But hey, we can always cover some basics, right ?

The most basic thing you need to follow is:

 Keep your program modular (loosely coupled)

It's easier to look at a program that's just simple modules talking to each other, than a growing spaghetti monster. It's also easier to switch stuff around.

Example

Let's say you have a Client class that uses a SQLite Database object to write and read from that database. One day your project manager tells you that SQLite sucks and he wants to to write and read to a file instead.

Interface

How can we switch writing to database to writing to a file ? They seem like two very distant things. Yeah, but they have something in common, they're both writing to some local storage. Let's make an interface/protocol/abstract class LocalStorage. Make SQLiteImplementation, and FileReadWriteImplementation, conform to this interface and make the Client talk to LocalStorage object. It explains a one simple rule:

 Always separate your interface, from your concrete classes if you have more than one implementation.

It's done using a simple design pattern called Bridge, or Strategy. They're the same thing implementation-wise but have different uses. 

IoC

How can we tell the Client which implementation to use ? Doesn't the Client create his own LocalStorage objects ? Well, it does, if the code is tightly coupled. 

In a perfect scenario, something from outside tells the Client which local storage to use. It's called Inversion of Control and the most popular implementation of that principle is Dependency Injection. We inject (tell the Client) the dependencies (Client depends on the database) to the class. Which brings us to our next rule:

 Use Dependency Injection (IoC)

It makes code highly reusable, losely coupled, easy to test, plus it has a great advantage while creating Unit Tests.

A little extra: Using mocks in unit testing

How do you write unit tests for server calls? Calls to databases without actually connecting to one ? Or how do you unit test if you still haven't finished some modules ? It's easy if you're using Dependency Injection.

Let's say we want to test our Client but we don't have access to the database. Just create a class LocalStorageMockImplementation that extends the LocalStorage interface and inject that class into the Client. Now you can test your client properly. Here's a quick tutorial if you want to know more.

Let it sink in

In my opinion, these are the basics that every developer should know, before writing a single line of code. It's not a lot to take in, and by sticking to these rules, you create a readable, highly reusable, changeable code - a miracle I have yet to experience.