Thanks for the explanations, Tim, I use both Mockito and other mocking frameworks on a regular basis so I'm quite acquainted with the field. Taking inspiration from them for the Async API was the first thing that crossed my own mind, so I agree totally this is a good idea. I was happy to see this taken up in Peter's article and the Async spec. But as always, the devil is in the details ;-) Even when having experience with mocking frameworks, using the record first / invoke later pattern feels unintuitive to me. I'll try to explain why. When you write your Mockito mock calls, you know that the calls will never trigger any real invocations (it would be an error if they did). Instead you are configuring expectations of invocations that another party (your test case) will perform. The actual invocations of the target methods (imperatively programmed in the test case code) will happen immediately and without any record first / invoke later semantics as soon as the test case calls them. In the OSGi Async scenario the calls on the mediator are supposed to lead to real invocations and therefore I expect them to trigger without any further delay, just as they do in my test case. Then of course, as you touch on, it must be possible to implement the chosen model in an orderly way. So here I have two followup questions: 1) Did you choose the record first / invoke later design because of implementation considerations/compromises, or because you feel it is more natural and intuitive for the user of the API? 2) What mechanisms do you have in mind that implementations could use for transferring the recorded calls to Async.call? I'm guessing ThreadLocal is the main alternative? Best regards Mike Timothy Ward wrote:
Hi Mike, Your interpretation of the behaviour described in the RFC is correct, including the roles of the mediator object and the async service. I'll outline the design process that we went through, and hopefully that will answer your question. One of the core problems associated with making this sort of asynchronous invocation is that you need to intercept a method call, immediately return a value that isn't the real result, eventually provide the result through some other means. It turns out that these requirements are very similar to those of a test mocking framework, for example Mockito. In Mockito you create a mock (or mediated) object, and the invocations made upon it are recorded. Configuring one of these mocks typically involves making the method call you wish to mock, e.g. Mockito.when(mock.doStuff()). This pattern works very well for the mediators produced by the Async Service too. The return type information from the mediator allows the generic type of the Promise to be determined. Given that the pattern was a natural fit, and the fact that mocking frameworks are widely used and understood, it was logical to reuse it. In addition to the parallels with mocking, there were several other aspects. * The return value from a method call is rarely a Promise/Future, which means that there must be some other mechanism to acquire the result. If the mediator calls directly began the asynchronous work then it would be easy to accidentally overwrite the Promise representing an earlier execution. The current API flow allows Async implementations to verify the API usage, and to throw exceptions if the mediator is used incorrectly. * Mediated objects are not thread safe, and should not be shared between bundles. The reason that they shouldn't be shared is because they would allow other bundles to act using your bundle context. Requiring them to be used with the Async service encourages safer coding patterns. In summary the mediated object isn't actually a proxy (which is why we chose the method name mediate, rather than proxy). The mediator simply records the method calls made upon it, and has nothing to delegate to. The Async implementation is the service providing the asynchronous behaviour, which is why it is the one that gets called to begin the execution. I hope that makes sense. Regards, Tim On 14 Mar 2014, at 13:28, Mike Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: Async RFC 206 (from March 03) at: https://github.com/osgi/design/tree/master/rfcs/rfc0206 >From section 5.4 we learn how to start an asynchronous invocation that has a return value: List asyncList = asyncService.mediate(listRef); Promise<Boolean> promise = asyncService.call(asyncList.contains("badEntry")); and one that has no return value (void method): mediator.clear(); Promise<Boolean> promise = asyncService.call(); The text explains that the actual asynchronous invocation doesn't take place until calling Async.call(), ie: asyncService.call(asyncList.contains("badEntry")); ^ send ^ prepare async async call call asyncList.clear(); // prepare async call asyncService.call(); // send async call Why did you choose this design, and did not choose to let a proxied method send its own async call? Best regards Mike _______________________________________________ OSGi Developer Mail List [email protected] https://mail.osgi.org/mailman/listinfo/osgi-dev
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