What about AOP?

I have read a lot of stuff on AOP recently. In the past couple years both the CACM and IEEE Software dedicated entire issues to AOP. However, after reading both of these and a host of other stuff I remained largely unconvinced.

However, when coding tricky projects we have been faced with times when we wished that we could inject code compiler at compile time - a typical thing that AOP will allow. In addition, I can see the utility of AOP for a lot of developer tools, for example, TypeMock - a C# mock object framework, uses AOP extensively. This brought me back to AOP.

I decided I would try (again) to do something with AspectJ. It seems to be one of the big guns of the AOP world (in CACM and IEEE Software, there were articles that originated with this project). In addition, there are very good AspectJ tools for Eclipse. This time, to help me I bought the Addison Wesley book on AspectJ with Eclipse (I forget the name just now). And decided I would try to read it over the summer holidays.

To my surprise, the book offered a new picture of AspectJ. In its introductory chapter it actually solved a real problem (serialization of objects) with something that seemed to be an AOP application (not a just a developer tool) that was useful. Much of the authors claims made sense. That is, use aspects to modualize objects that are in different inheritance hierachies. The serialization example was very convincing.

The idea is that a lot of busness objects should not mix thier busness logic with there "book keeping" code (for example how the object is stored). The result was similar code that cut across a number of unrelated objects could be treated in a unified way.

The more I looked at the examples presented by the author and the more I thought of it, the less excited I became. I am, however convinced that if used as another programming tool, AOP can be useful, but if you abuse the AOP hammer, I think you will end of with a big, complex, distributed mess. Here are my main beefs,

1. In Holub's Pattern book he makes a convincing pitch that objects should be able to save themselves in context. According to Holub, getter and setter (or properties if you come from C# land) are evil. I believe Holub in this case. The serialization aspect can not just save everyone by looking set and get methods and use them to serialize the object. Object serialization is a task the object must participate in. This is made clear in Holub's book. Otherwise, we trade modularity of the serialization code for a tangle of aspect and object code, with the guts of the objects exposed in the wild, rather than carefully concealed.
2. I note that in AspectJ you can write point cuts on private join points. For example, we could execute a bit of code every time the program accessed a private field. Is this really a good idea. Is it not really fragile to use a private point cut? The implementing private method has made no contract to exist and may be changed at anytime. This type of aspects might be good to hack to do something like unit testing with mocks, but we can not write application code like this.
3. Aspect interpretation is hard... too hard. When I read my first paper on AspectJ the authors emphasized that tool support would be required if the framework was to be adopted. I think that tool support is good, but tool requirement is bad. That is, if when I write a point cut I need a tool to show me which objects (might be affected), then I am in trouble. I think that writing point cuts is like writing regular expression. Seems easy until you have to do something really hard. Sometimes you ge more hits tht you think you will and it is very difficult to see the difference. With this, the advantage of AOP (localized code for dispersed object) becomes a disadvantage. You never know which objects will be hid by an AOP bug and the object and aspect code are dispersed, so you might have a hard time locating the bad line of code.
4. Your object can not count on aspects (usually). Here is a philosphical point. Should the object know there will be an aspect attached to it. If not, why does it not implement all the code required to do its business (rather that stuffing some code in a aspect). If it does know, why is it not more specific about its contract with the aspect. I think this is where I am now. I would like to use aspects, but I would like my objects to expose a public point cut interface that could be used by the aspect for stuff the object would have had to do. Then and only then can the object remove "non-business" code. Otherwise, the only thing we have done is created a dependance between the object and the aspect that is implicit, required but very weak (can you ship the object without the aspect - AspectJ say - go ahead).

So there is my 2 cents worth on AOP. I think when we do AOP the objects would do well to define a set of exposed point cuts. I don't think we should bend over backwards looking for aspects - aspects are suppose to deal with cross-cutting issues. If there are no cross-cutting issues using an aspect (or inventing an abstract cross-cutting issue) is just making things more difficult than it needs to be (I had the impression to read an article like this in IEEE Software). Finally, I don't think that an aspect should ever point cut a private or protected or package join point. Maybe for a developer tool, but not for a application. An OO programmer would not use reflection to execute a private method just because he could after all, so an aspect should not do the same thing.

On 10 Things Jim Mischel Hates About C#

The other day a read Jim Mischel expound on the 10 things he hates about C#. I was a bit disappointed because most of the things he didn't like about C# he wouldn't like about C or any of its decendants. I think he missed all the meat. Take a look here before I add my two cents worth.

Jim's Top Ten

1. No Anonymous Inner Classes

Anyone who says they don't like the syntax of anonymous inner classes misses the point of C-like languages. That is, minimizing the amount of text minimizes the amount of errors and using common idioms eliminates common errors. No anonymous inner classes ensure that there is always a large amount of boilerplate infrastructure to hack up everytime you ever want to implement a class that will only ever be created in one place (does IEnumerable and IEnumerator mean anything to you). I hate creating private named IEnumerables when I could easily do the same thing with an anonymous class. The syntax might be something pascal programmers are not use to, but we are after all highly paid programmers. Besides, putting the code right beside where it is used rather than in some dusty corner *always* makes it easier to maintain. I can not see why anyone would prefer not to use anaymous inner classes at every opportunity... must be a hold over from our BASIC days.

2. Interfaces Can't have Inner Objects

How many times do you implement an exception that is only thrown by an interface method, or an enum that is only used in an interface. Why can not these be inner classes and enums on the interface itself. This allows the internals to be encapsulated within the interface and it reduces namespace pollution by seldom used items.

3. Enums aren't Objects

Enums can not have any body. But this is not the way they are used. Enums often have services they have to perform, like showing as a translated string, saving themselves in a persistence framework or just display themselves in the UI (as a drop down menu for example). These are real needs (google whack "enum C# ToString" and you will see what I mean). Enums should not be just a short list of ints. In an object oriented language they should be full class objects.

4. I Don't Like Delegates (and I like Events even less).

The syntax of delagates still confuses me, their place in the object hierachy confuses me (e.g. what is "this" when you are in a delegate method). I don't think there is a need for a function wrapper in an object oriented language. An no, there is nothing object-oriented about a delegate.
I can say the same for events, except the syntax is even worse and more confusing. How can this:

button.Click -= new Event (myEvent);

remove an event listener when I just created a new delegate. I think the entire event system in .NET was made so that the people who implemented VisualStudio had an easier time (and to hell with the people who have to use the generated code).

I don't think I have to go to 10. I am disapointed Jim just came up with the same "don't like C conditionals" ... blah, blah, blah. C is about minimizing typing, using standard implementation idioms and putting the code near to where the action is taking place. I think if you don't like these ideas, then, effectively, you won't like C or any of its decendants (no sweat). Having said that, there is lots of things about C# that we don't have to like (assuming we like C). I listed a few. I think if you have not felt the same need, you aren't really trying. Almost every day I code C# I miss anonymous inner classes and inner classes on interfaces.

XML, Strings and "Simple" Text Processing

Last friday I was hacking up a simple system for maintaining a presistent local parameter store. I did not want to waste a lot time on it, so I decided I would persist my parameters in an XML file and store the file everytime a parameter was added or changed. After finishing the implementation, the first thing I wanted to do was persist an XML document, represented as a string (a log4net configuration document). No problem I thought, its just text - I had a key node with the parameter key and a value node where I persisted the XML document.

When I went to implement a simple parameter editor, I thought... after editing, maybe my XML document is non-conforming. I think I will reload it into an XML document after editing to test its validity. Much to my disappointment, when I did this everything broke. All my XML elements were XML encoded as <node-name> and when I reloaded the document I got lots of errors. What went wrong.

In fact, when I loaded the document into the XML document and later stored the document inner XML (in .NET C#) the new text contained an node giving the encoding of the document. Since this was being stored as an XML node in my parameters document, the XML framework thought it must be text and encoded it for me. This show why XML sucks. You can not just blindly add text to a document. If I would have added XML that was not well-formed in a single node, this could break my containing document.

To counter this I decided to base64 encode the xml text and push it into a CDATA section of my parameters document. Okay, the text of my parameters document would not be as easy to hack, but I could guarantee that any parameter could be put in the document without breaking the container. This is the source of today's rant. I find the C# API for such a task is crappy.

First, what I expected to do was to create a string object that was the base64 representation of my initial string object. But the Convert method for creating a base64 string takes a byte array (okay that is logical), but to create a byte array from a string you have to get text encoding object and call the GetBytes method. One would expect that string could expose a constructor that takes and encoding and a byte array and a GetBytes method that could create a byte array. I spent 1/2 hour looking though the crappy .NET documentation trying to find the objects collaborating in the string to byte array sequence before stumbling upon the correct incantation. Then I spent another 1/2 hour doing the same thing for converting a byte array back to a string.

The basic problem here is that you should be able to say, "string, give me a byte array representation of yourself - here is my encoding scheme" - I think this is the Java strategy and I think it is the logical one. What .NET has is "encoding, here is a string, take a peak inside its current implementation and representation and give me a byte array represetation of it". I think it breaks encapsulation and you really have to have a lot of experience working in domains where character encodings are important (i.e. where 99% of all north american programmers like myself don't work) before you even guess where the solution might be located.

The second problem is that all the .NET documentation (no... make that all Microsoft documentation) is broken in the 1/2 screen factoids with circular references between every three pages. Examples are designed to make people quit trying. For example, I recently looked at the documenation for getting directory information and an example program was presented showing how to print out the various parts of a file path without showing what the various method calls should return... I suppose they expect you to create a project, copy and paste the example code and run the example if you are really interested in knowing what the method calls do, rather than just clearly explaining it in the description of the methods.

Review Your Code

The other day one of my little boys was sick at home, so as I had to spend the day with him. I decided to write a presentation document - using OpenOffice Impress - describing the technical details of an iteration release of one of our products. The idea was that we produce some much code, for so many different products that, first we don't remember what we did or how we solved the problems a month later and second, people who were not sitting in on the coding session don't have a good idea of how the code works. I thought an Impress presentation would allow us all to quickly review what we did on a release, and the developers who did the code could give insight to the implementation strategies.

We have not really had a review meeting (but this will happen), but I found the process of writing the code review presentation to be very informative for me. First, I am the worst when it comes to forgetting what I did two weeks ago (I am the burnt out coder after all). Second when we isolate code sections for a simple presentation, we see inconsistencies and omissions that are not appearent when you are busy hacking code. In one section of the presentations I talk about the major interfaces that we implemented. I show a UML class diagram of the interface on the left with a description on the right. That's it... one interface per slide. Under this presentation you notice things about the interface design the you don't when it is all mungied-up with other classes and interfaces.

In the end, on one hand I could see that some interface members may have been asymetrically or inconsistently implemented, but on the other hand we don't add things to interfaces lightly and everything is the subject to quite a bit of debate. Also we have a strict rule about not adding stuff we don't need. Currently the interfaces work (warts and all) and that is the most important thing. I am happy with the review and I am happy with the structure of the interfaces. I find the time spent writing the review was not wasted.

I am back

I have not been blogging very often, but I have been working hard. We have created a lot of code and I have a lot of cool projects on the go. Version 4 of our principal product is progressing in fits and starts. We are implementing the foundation using some of the most incomprehensible code that I have ever written.

We corrected a major problem with the PTI (ProjectTypeIndexer) today. This is an object that is repsonsible for finding other addressable objects at runtime, from "nearby" dl'ls, validating the rules associated with them and allowing them to be integrated into the project as first class citizens. The bug had to do with how the change manager rebuilt this object so that once one user identified and integrated a type, it could be distributed to to other user using a commit/synch workflow.

Rarely have we written such simple code that has such a contorted runtime trace.

With this bug fix we are on target to finish implemented basic change management for graphic objects. This project has put such an emphasis on change management (using local and distributed workflows) that I don't think we will ever look at implemented an undo/redo facility in the same way. We learned lots of stuff and when everything starts working it is super cool....