Working on a real project has really helped me learn many things, but especially good design techniques. In particular, my project will be used as a plugin for an existing piece of open source software (Phon, a tool for phonological analysis). To not see the past few months worth of work go to waste, I've been given permission to take this project on as my own (it'll show up on my GitHub account eventually), so I'm really designing this to be something that's easily usable and extendable by others. In its simplest form, it's a framework for designing complex operations from simpler ones (think Quartz Composer, but more general).
Since I'm designing something that will be used by others, I really need to think twice about every decision I make. Some discussion points on my experience so far:
- I want my API to be final (in the Java sense of the word) so that people can depend on it (e.g., backwards-compatibility), but I still want the API to be extendable. I've implemented a simple extension mechanism that permits this freedom. Anyone can simply query an API structure for a certain extension, and if it exists they will get an instance of that extension to work with. Otherwise, they get a whole buch of null.
- Modular programming can be a wonderful thing for an API. When I started, I just had one massive project. When I chose Maven for building, I decided to move to a modular design. What I ended up with is a set of modules (e.g., API, GUI, XML IO) that are tightly coupled. Right now I'm working on decoupling these modules as much as possible and, soon enough, modules will depend only on the API module, which is the way it should be.
- I've never really designed anything modularly before, but what I've learned is that dependency injection (DI) is a beautiful thing. In particular, I make extensive use of service discovery to get implementations of what I need. I may eventually look into OSGi, but don't want to be bound to it, so I've abstracted away my service discovery mechanism so even it too is determined through DI.
It has been a fun time designing this API, and I'm hoping that within two weeks I'll have it completely modular, and ready to go for Phon. A couple of weeks after that, it'll be up on my GitHub. I'm really hoping it's something people will want to use, and if they do, a framework they enjoy working with!
