Book Image

Design Patterns and Best Practices in Java

By : Kamalmeet Singh, Adrian Ianculescu, Lucian-Paul Torje
Book Image

Design Patterns and Best Practices in Java

By: Kamalmeet Singh, Adrian Ianculescu, Lucian-Paul Torje

Overview of this book

Having a knowledge of design patterns enables you, as a developer, to improve your code base, promote code reuse, and make the architecture more robust. As languages evolve, new features take time to fully understand before they are adopted en masse. The mission of this book is to ease the adoption of the latest trends and provide good practices for programmers. We focus on showing you the practical aspects of smarter coding in Java. We'll start off by going over object-oriented (OOP) and functional programming (FP) paradigms, moving on to describe the most frequently used design patterns in their classical format and explain how Java’s functional programming features are changing them. You will learn to enhance implementations by mixing OOP and FP, and finally get to know about the reactive programming model, where FP and OOP are used in conjunction with a view to writing better code. Gradually, the book will show you the latest trends in architecture, moving from MVC to microservices and serverless architecture. We will finish off by highlighting the new Java features and best practices. By the end of the book, you will be able to efficiently address common problems faced while developing applications and be comfortable working on scalable and maintainable projects of any size.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The visitor pattern


Let's go back to the shapes application we introduced when talking about the command pattern. We applied the command pattern, so we have to redo the operations implemented. It's time to add a save functionality.

We might think that if we add an abstract Save method to the base shape class and if we extend it for each of the shapes, we have the problem solved. This solution is maybe the most intuitive, but not the best. First of all, each class should have a single responsibility.

Secondly, what happens if we need to change the format in which we want to save each shape? If we are implementing the same methods to generate an XML out, do we then have to change to JSON format? This design definitely does not follow the open/closed principle.

Intent

The visitor pattern separates an operation from the object structure on which it operates, allowing the addition of new operations without changing the structure classes.

Implementation

The visitor pattern defines a set of operations...