Re: Constructor
 
On Sat, 27 Sep 2008, zerg wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote:
On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Mark Space wrote:
public class Factory {
 private Factory() {}
 public static Wrapper getNew( Implementation i ) {
   Wrapper w = new Wrapper( i );
   Registry.register( w );  // not shown
   return w;
 }
}
This more or less what i was thinking - convert inheritance to composition, 
and do the registration in the wrapper after the implementation is 
constructed.
This also resembles decorator, but the changeable part is the core instead of 
the wrapper.
Of course, calling subclass specific methods might be a pain,
Yes - if the subclasses extend the interface rather than just the 
implementation, this approach doesn't work at all.
unless you use generics to make the wrapper a kind of "one-element 
container" with a get method that returns the object.
The wrapper would be better named something like "RegisteredFoo" to 
indicate that it wraps a Foo and registers it -- wherever the Foo that 
is passed in must be registered something like RegisteredFoo<?> would be 
the parameter type instead of just Foo.
Not a bad idea. If you do this, it really does start to look a lot like 
Decorator, you're right.
My second approach, of not using a wrapper but doing the registration 
post-construction in a factory method, lets the subclasses extend the 
interface, but since the factory method returns the base type, you do have 
to do an explicit cast first.
Although you could do something like this:
public <T extends Implementation> T create(Class<T> implClass) {
 	T impl = implClass.newInstance() ;
 	register(impl) ;
 	return impl ;
}
You could use a more complicated reflective invocation instead of 
newInstance, or you could do something clever with factories:
public <T extends Implementation> T create(ImplFactory<T> implFactory) {
 	T impl = implFactory.create(some args) ;
 	register(impl) ;
 	return impl ;
}
The trouble with this is you then have to write factories for each 
implementation subclass, and it starts to look like you've got at least 
one too many layers of indirection here!
tom
-- 
unstable orbits in the space of lies