Graham Leggett wrote:
Emmanuel Lecharny wrote:
That's the main issue... Xbeans is trying to alleviate the pain it is
to manipulate class names in a Spring file. As I already said, it
creates a decoupling which is painfull, as you have no clue about
what is what in the Spring file when you have decoupled those two
parts. We have more than 2500 classes in Directory (not counting
Studio), and even after 5 years working on the project, I can't
easily remember where all of them are located.
The name of the principle you are currntly violating by using Spring
is called the "Don't repeat yourself" principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
By storing class names in two places (the Java class file, and the
Spring bean definition XML file) you are adding 2500 different
opportunities for the classes and spring configs to go out of sync.
And there is nothing in the class to suggest that a spring bean is
somehow relevant, making refactoring impossible, and that kills code.
=> why using Spring ? :)
To be frank, and we discussed that ad nauseam with Alex, using Spring
was one of the biggest mistakes we made. We don't need Inversion of
control/Depenency Injection/whatever Fowler call it. This is useless
in our case. What we need is a configuration which can be loaded at
startup, and that's it. what we had before (a property file) was just
plain ok. OpenLDAP is now storing the configuration in the DIT, and
it works perfectly well.
And if we don't want to go back to a property file, or config in the
DIT, then JSON can be an intersting option. Everything but this
infamous brackets all over the configration !!! Die, XML, die !
When I use XML as a config, I define that config as an XSD, throw the
XSD through xmlbeans to write all the parsing code for me, and then I
make sure the config file is properly validated on load.
The only little problem with this approach is that writing a XSD is an
order of magnitude more painful than dealing with all the Spring crap.
=> Why using XML when not absolutely necessary ? ;)
Die, XML, die ! (well, I may die before XML ... :/ )
--
--
cordialement, regards,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
directory.apache.org
