(403) Revisiting the Anything Pattern

Peer-Refereed Talk

Wednesday, 2007-06-27, 12:10 - 12:50, Arena 6

Stefan Tramm - Netcetera (speaker)
Jason Brazile
David Oetiker
Stefan Rufer
Stefan Ferstl
Daniel Eichhorn

Topics

Download the presentation

Abstract

The Anything design pattern was first introduced at EuroPLOP 98 as one component of a set of Do-It-Yourself reflection classes [1]. It was initially presented as a structured data container primarily useful as a generic configuration parameter. The Anything pattern features a serialized string representation of an easily parsable but human readable composition of lists and associative arrays, similar to alternatives provided by S-expressions [2], JSON [3] and more recently XOM [4]. The original implementation of the Anything was in C++ and based upon the ET++ Framework [5]. However it was soon ported to Java by IFA and Andre Weinand and further enhanced in 1999 by itopia and Marcel Rueedi. This paper describes recent extensions to the Java Anything [6], which provide support for features interesting in database applications. In particular, datatypes for Dates and BigDecimals have been introduced to use the Anything as an universal DTO (Data Transfer Object) [7] as well as the implementation of an AnyDAO (Data Access Object) [8], which among other features, includes support for efficient batched inserts. This allows an intuitive programming interface and intermediate data format useful for providing continuous offline unit-testing and simplified development and debugging cycles. Additionally, further uses of the Anything pattern are explored including the use of the Anything to support a "data-as-code" paradigm, where a set of "primitives" is implemented that can be "scripted" at run-time via an Anything, providing an extreme case of dynamic configuration. Finally, the features of the Anything are compared and contrasted with various existing alternatives, and a list of possible future enhancements is presented. References [1] P. Sommerlad and M. Rueedi, Do-it-yourself reflection, in EuroPLOP 98: Third European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming and Computing, 1998. [Online]. Available: http://hillside.net/europlop/HillsideEurope/Papers/DIY_Reflection.pdf [2] R. L. Rivest, S-expressions, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Draft, 1997. [Online]. Available: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/sexp.txt [3] D. Crockford, The application/json media type for javascript object notation (JSON), Internet Engineering Task Force, RFC 4627, Jul 2006. [Online]. Available: http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1738.txt [4] M. Reinhold, XOM: Integrating XML into the Java programming language, in JavaONE 2006: Proceedings of the JavaOne Conference. Sun, 2006. [5] A. Weinand, E. Gamma, and R. Marty, ET++ an object oriented application framework in C++, in OOPSLA '88: Conference proceedings on Object Oriented programming systems, languages and applications. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, 1988, pp. 4657. [6] S. Tramm, java-anything, Visited Nov 2006. [Online]. Available: http://code.google.com/p/java-anything/ [7] Data transfer object, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Transfer_Object. [8] Data access object, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Access_Object.