Aaron Maenpaa

An Entertaining Meme

An entertaining meme

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
134 ls
90 svn
77 cd
16 sudo
15 gvim
12 rm
11 script/server
11 hg
10 mongrel_rails
7 slocate

404s in Ruby on Rails

One of the things that has been irking me while using Ruby on Rails is the difficulty involved in returning a 404 page. For the most part RoR does a good job of Doing-the-Right-Thing^TM when encountering an exception, for example, it converts RecordNotFound and RoutingErrors into 404 pages in production mode; however, there are times when I (the programmer) know that a page doesn't exist but RoR has not yet raised an exception. In such cases, it feels truly wrong to simply raise a RecordNotFound exception, as the semantics are questionable and sometimes I'd rather see my 404 page rather than the traceback page, even in development mode. I've found an example of how to coerce Rails to exhibit the desired behaviour; however, it's kind of messy in that it forces every request to be considered public. The following is a far cleaner solution.

class HttpStatus < Exception
  attr_reader :status
  attr_reader :template

  def initialize(status, template)
      @status = status
      @template = template
  end
end

class Http404 < HttpStatus
  def initialize
      super(404, "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/404.html")
  end
end

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protected
      def rescue_action(exception)
          if exception.is_a? HttpStatus
              render :status => exception.status, :file => exception.template
          else
              super
          end
      end
end

Essentially, we override ApplicationController::rescue_action to special case exceptions derived from HttpStatus to set the response status code and render a template. This solution is ideal as it works with both public and local requests and does not interfere with the handling of existing exceptions which already have their own meanings.

The mechanics of how it works are fairly simple: rescue_action is the method that dispatches between rescue_action_in_public and rescue_action_locally, thus by overriding rescue_action rather than either rescue_action_in_public or rescue_action_locally we can define the behaviour of rescue independant of whether or not a request is considered local and thus avoid messing with either local_request? or consider_all_requests_local. Furthermore, by defining our own class of exceptions to invoke the special processing in rescue_action, the applications behaviour is only changed when handling the custom exception, rather than overloading the meaning of existing exceptions.

Snakes on a Plane

... cartiesian plane that is.

Beauty or Beast - I'm not sure which

I recently came across the following bit of strangeness: in Java, an interface cannot have static methods; however, an interface can have public static classes, which themselves can have static methods. Which in effect allows you to put static methods on an interface, like so1:

interface Thinger{
    public static class util{
        public Thinger parse(InputStream in){ ... }
        public void serialize(Thinger thinger, OutputStream out) { ... }
    }

    public Thing doSomething();
}

"Why on earth do you want to put static methods on an interface?" you might ask. Essentially, static methods on an interface would allow the interface designers to provide utilities that do useful things with implementors of the interface without having to create a separate utility class, or worse toss the desired functions into an existing utility class.

I'm somewhat torn on whether this is a particularly good or a particularly bad idea. On the one hand, implementing generic algorithms in terms of interfaces is a truly handy thing to do and providing those implementations close to the interface definition seems to be helpful. Furthermore, creating interface specific utility classes helps to avoid the creation of monstrous Util classes whose cohesion can be summarized as "code other code uses". On the other hand, the designers of the language obviously didn't want actual code injected into interfaces, after all static methods are prohibited on interfaces. As such, I'm undecided. This is either really awesome or really awful.

Collections API: A Case for Utility Classes on Interfaces

Case-in-point, the collections API2 includes a class named Collections whose sole purpose is to provide interesting and useful methods to implementers of Map, List, Set, Collection and others.

Hierarcy of the classes in the collections API. Shown are the principle interfaces and the Collections utility class.

Dependency graph of the collections API. Notice how the Collections class couples together List, Set and Map without any real reason.

Collections is a large and complicated class with 53 methods (as of Java 6.0) with little cohesion. The class could arguably be decomposed into interface specific utility classes like so:

interface Collection<E>{
    public static class util {t
        static <T> Collection<T> synchronizedCollection(Collection<T> c){ ... }
        static <T> Collection<T> unmodifiableCollection(Collection<? extends T> c){ ... }
        ...
    }

    boolean add(E e);
    ...
}

interface List<E>{
    public static class util {
        static <T> List<T> synchronizedList(List<T> list){ ... }
        static <T> List<T> unmodifiableList(List<? extends T> list){ ... }
        ...
    }

    boolean add(E e);
    ...
}

By providing implementation of the utility methods directly in the interface definition we eliminate the need for the Collections class entierly, and improve the cohesion of the utility methods that are collected together in structure specific utility classes.

We can see that not only does this remove the need for the Collections class, but it also removes the unnecessary dependencies that Collections introduced. Whether that's a compelling enough reason to be a little fast and loose with the definition of interface is up to you.

Nathalie for VP Finance

My contribution to the campaign.

Yeah, I know that I can not draw, but that doesn't stop me from trying!