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What do you call a...well, that's the problem

Posted by timboudreau on May 5, 2009 at 9:45 PM EDT
A few of months ago I blogged about a simple but powerful pattern for working with Objects not key/value pairs - use dynamic proxies to generate an implementation of an interface, which delegates to the backing storage transparently. It's ready to become a small open source project.

Names are important — they should either be communicative and say what a thing is/does — or they should be completely ad-hoc (think bird names and such).

What do you call a library/class where:

  • You pass in a Map or map-like thing (Properties, Preferences, Wicket PageParameters...) and an interface type as a blueprint
  • It gives you back an implementation of that interface/blueprint that lets you access the data in an intuitive, type-safe way
bluetree.png
Lobby of the Blue Tree hotel in Brasilia, Brasil
It amazes me that they found real trees that look
like computer-generated fractal trees in an architect's 3D model
I'd tried on "Transparent Serialization" — but I think the term serialization would be confusing — the term is too overloaded.

Any suggestions out there?

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Comments

by timboudreau - 2009-05-10 14:37

Hmm, MapProxy. I like that...

by evanx - 2009-05-07 07:52

maybe MapProxy

by vieiro - 2009-05-07 00:00

I forgot to mention that these Objectrons are *very* useful to me right now, so thanks and congratulations!

by kirillcool - 2009-05-06 21:57

Fabricator?

by vieiro - 2009-05-06 12:19

"Simple Property Marshalling"? That's too long! This is a clear case of a Small Object Accelerator (SOA, aka Object Fabric or Objectron Builder), producing Objectrons from interfaces and values. (Note that Objectrons are radiactive and must be used with care). I think someone is building a Big One of these ([1]) to find a particle that God has lost somewhere ([2]). [1] http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html [2] http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/achenbach-text

by fabriziogiudici - 2009-05-06 05:14

Given that "marshalling (similar to serialization) is the process of transforming the memory representation of an object to a data format suitable for storage or transmission." and that you're dealing with standard getters/setters, what about "Simple Bean Marshalling"? If I understand properly, this definition covers a broader case (you're talking about Map-like structures, while marshalling could be anything). So, perhaps "Simple Property Marshalling" is more adequate? After all, people usually marshalls properties in Map-like structures.