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You don't have to start with patterns

Posted by daniel on September 22, 2004 at 11:06 AM EDT

Refactoring can take you where you need to go.

You are coding along and notice that you have a fairly lengthy case statement that you have used more than once. It occurs to you that the State pattern might be a better approach and so you start to refactor your code. In today's Weblogs, Vincent Brabant praises Joshua Kerievski's book Refactoring to Patterns as "The best book I readed concerning Patterns."

You don't start coding and decide what pattern to use. You notice, in the process of adding functionality to a program that you have a situation in which applying a pattern can simplify the code or better express what is being done.

Joshua posted versions of the book as it grew over time and many people contributed comments on his refactorings. We're pleased to announce that he will be leading a discussion of his book as our bookclub selection here on java.net starting late October.

Mason Glaves stops by with a new post titled Two bugs in two years, new features every week, deadlines met each and every time… and what’s with these ruby slippers? He noticed he wasn't in Kansas anymore at his interview. "Instead of long aimless talks about where I plan to be in 10 years, what I think my faults are, and the usual subtle duck-and-weave fare that comes with two entities feeling each other out, I sat down with the chief architect in front of his 21 inch LCD and over the next hour we added a new feature to their radius server. It was my first baby steps into the world of XP."

Lance Anderson announces Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8 2004Q4 Beta is now available.

In Also in Java Today , if you always find yourself reaching for the list based collection classes, take a look at Jack Shirazi's Introduction to Java Map Collection Classes. His intro details the APIs and explains that rather than being keyed on numbers, "Maps provide a more general way of storing elements. The Map collection type allows you to store pairs of elements, termed "keys" and "values", where each key maps to one value. Conceptually, you could consider Lists as Maps which have numeric keys. However in practice there no direct connection between Lists and Maps except that they are both defined in java.util. In this article, we will focus on the Maps that are available with the core Java distribution, and also consider how to adapt or implement specialized Maps that are more optimal for your application specific data."

You can straightening out your XML by validating it against a schema. In XML Document Validation with an XML Schema, Deepak Vohra explains, "an XML schema defines the structure of the elements and attributes in an XML document. For an XML document to be valid based on an XML schema, the XML document has to be validated against the XML schema." The article then shows how to configure and use JAXP and Xerces2-j parsers.

In Projects and Communities , the JavaDesktop page links to the article Processing Image Pixels using Java, for directly manipulating image pixels, but with the caveats that its PixelGrabber approach is no longer preferred, and that getting a pixel array can impair 2D acceleration.

The Java Tools community has released the latest edition of its newsletter, spotlighting new tools, tips for project owners, and news from the community's projects. Look for it each week.

Robilad asks about Releasing the TCK in today's Forums."You can't put a 'must not distribute unless passes a TCK' restriction in a free software license, so that would not really be free. There is of course a very simple solution: release the TCK under a free license, so that everyone can check how compatible different Java implementations are on their platform."

Murphee thinks that many of the arguments of why we need to fork to add features to Java may be overstated. "You don't need to fork anything for this; just look at AspectJ, which is also a extension of the Java language which features Aspect Oriented programming constructs."

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