Gustavo Hexsel wrote:

 Isn't it contradicting that you guys use abstract classes because they are more 
"evolvable" and then lock everything with "final" so things don't change as 
easily?
Evolvable means that it is easier to add stuff to the class. The Wicket team is responsible for evolving the classes, by providing stuff like Ajax, CSS/JavaScript support, etc. By making stuff final we make sure that things that are internal to us, stay that way.

Effectively those methods are no longer part of the public API. Every public extension point we provide is no longer available to us to change at our leisure. It is /the goal/ of a framework designer to minimize the number of extension points, and at the same time deliver as much functionality and flexibility as possible. There is a thin line, and that line is created and maintained by making things final.

I quote Joshua Bloch here: design and document for inheritence or else prohibit it. This is exactly what we do. We design our API such that you can add your necessary functionality to the components, leveraging the rich functionality the components provide.

There are lots of moments when we were saved by having something final, and also a lot of moments where something wasn't final, but should have been.

Martijn


 []s Gus



---------- InĂ­cio da mensagem original -----------

     De: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   Para: [email protected]
Cc: Data: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:06:57 +0200
Assunto: Re: [Wicket-user] Why no page interface?

i agree.

When you have a IPage object there should be able to have multiply Page implementations. But this is not really possible because the internals of page are pretty importand for wicket to let it work

If you have a full blown page with all kind of components on it. I don't think putting an other page implementation beneath it
that does honor the complete interface will really render the page...
So if that isn't possible what is the use?

johan


Eelco Hillenius wrote:
Hi,

One /very/ important reason not to use interfaces in this case is that: interfaces are hard to evolve. Interfaces have to be pretty darn stable before even considering throwing them out in the public, as there is no way (not without a tough fight at least) you can alter it later on - even adding a new method will break all clients.

Another reason not to use interfaces here is that there is so much behaviour in here (in the pages and components), that it is very hard to extract something usefull out of it. What would the interface of a Page be? One of the good practices when making interfaces is that they should be small. Having an interface like http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/tapestry/apidocs/org/apache/tapestry/IPage.html doesn't really display that. They can be large, like the collection interfaces are, but they have to be really, really stable and consistent.

Just to be sure, and as I didn't make this decision for Wicket I asked Jonathan Locke (who is doing movie stuff now, and left the mailing lists for some time) why he choose for interfaces. Here's a partial transcript of our chat:

[22:31] jonathan: i don't believe in big interfaces
[22:31] jonathan: no interface should be as large as Page
[22:32] jonathan: it's too fragile
[22:35] jonathan: abstract classes are evolvable
[22:36] jonathan: interfaces should always be a set of methods that you cannot ever imagine extending
[22:36] jonathan: it encapsulates a very specific set of behaviors
[22:37] jonathan: everyone should feel free to create/extract his own IPage interface for use with proxies [22:38] jonathan: there's something fundamentally wrong with the way that current OO languages try to wire things together with static interfaces. [22:39] jonathan: unless i'm missing something, this is really not a problem with wicket
[22:40] jonathan: in fact i think it's a feature
[22:40] jonathan: interfaces are really most useful for things that are truly pluggable
[22:43] jonathan: my ideal number of methods in an interface is 1
[22:43] jonathan: ;-)
[22:44] jonathan: 2 is okay in some cases
[22:44] jonathan: 3 often should be re-thought
[22:44] jonathan: the more methods you have, the more likely it is that you've got a bad design

So, it is a design decission not to work with interfaces. However, as Jonathan stated, you could extract an interface, let your page class implement it and off you go. Furthermore, I wonder what it is you want to do with a proxy that you can't do by simply subclassing? Or AOP?

As a final statement I'd like to add that a framework like Wicket is very different from a business system, which could have tons of business methods that must be pluggable. Though even in that case, I think too that interfaces are overused/ get too much focus with some of the current popular frameworks. Seems to be getting a knee-jerk reaction instead of a design decision. But maybe that's just me.

Regards,

Eelco


Peter Veentjer - Anchor Men wrote:

I`m trying to add Spring annotations to the Page, but because there is no page interface and only a Page class (with final methods) it is not possible to create a proxy and therefor it is impossible to enhance objects. This is very inconvenient..

Why are the components not designed from interfaces? Designing from interfaces is common oo practice.



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