Book Image

Scala Design Patterns - Second Edition

By : Ivan Nikolov
Book Image

Scala Design Patterns - Second Edition

By: Ivan Nikolov

Overview of this book

Design patterns make developers’ lives easier by helping them write great software that is easy to maintain, runs efficiently, and is valuable to the company or people concerned. You’ll learn about the various features of Scala and will be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work. The book starts off by focusing on some of the most interesting and latest features of Scala while using practical real-world examples. We will be learning about IDE’s and Aspect Oriented Programming. We will be looking into different components in Scala. We will also cover the popular "Gang of Four" design patterns and show you how to incorporate functional patterns effectively. The book ends with a practical example that demonstrates how the presented material can be combined in real-life applications. You’ll learn the necessary concepts to build enterprise-grade applications. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and understanding to quickly assess problems and come up with elegant solutions.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

The null object design pattern

Most object-oriented languages have a way of specifying the nonexistence of some value. In Scala and Java, for example, this could be the null value that can be assigned to an object. Calling any method on an object that is null would result in a NullPointerException, hence developers should be careful and check whether there is such a possibility. These checks, however, could make the source code hard to follow and extend as developers should always be aware. This is where the null object design pattern is helpful.

The purpose of the null object design pattern is to define an actual object that represents the null value and has neutral behavior.

Using null objects removes the need to check whether something is set to null or not. The code becomes much more readable and easy to understand and makes bug occurrence harder.

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