Newsletter sign-up
View all newsletters

Enterprise Java Newsletter
Stay up to date on the latest tutorials and Java community news posted on JavaWorld

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

JavaWorld.com > Java Standard Edition >

Strategy for success

The powerful Strategy design pattern aids object-oriented design

By David Geary, JavaWorld.com, 04/26/02

  • Print
  • Feedback
.

Back in 1984, I graduated from college with a mechanical engineering degree and went to work as a software engineer. After teaching myself C programming, by 1985 I was busily developing a 50,000-line graphical user interface (GUI) for Unix. That was fun.

By the end of 1985, my program complete, I was ready to move to other projects—or so I thought. I soon received a slew of bug reports and enhancement requests, so I started wading through my 50,000 lines to make fixes. That was hard.

I had created a veritable house of cards that came tumbling down almost daily. And that house of cards fell easily; even the most innocuous changes often left me debugging for hours just to restore the program's stability.

I thought I had stumbled upon an important software development tenet: have fun during development, then look for a new job after deployment. In fact, however, my difficulties stemmed from my ignorance of the most fundamental tenet of object-oriented (OO) software development: encapsulation. My program was a huge switch-statement collection that invoked different functions under different circumstances—resulting in tightly coupled and difficult-to-change software.

In this Java Design Patterns installment, I discuss perhaps the most fundamental design pattern: Strategy. If I had known about the Strategy pattern in 1984, I would have avoided a great deal of work.

The Strategy pattern

In Chapter 1 of the Gang of Four's (GOF) Design Patterns, the authors discuss several OO design principles comprising the core of many patterns. The Strategy pattern embodies two such principles—encapsulate the concept that varies and program to an interface, not an implementation. The Design Patterns authors define the Strategy pattern as:

Define a family of algorithms, encapsulate each one, and make them interchangeable. [The] Strategy [pattern] lets the algorithm vary independently from clients that use it.


The Strategy pattern lets you build software as a loosely coupled collection of interchangeable parts, in contrast to a monolithic, tightly coupled system. That loose coupling makes your software much more extensible, maintainable, and reusable.

To teach the Strategy pattern, I first illustrate how Swing uses the Strategy pattern to draw borders around its components. Then I discuss how Swing benefits by using the Strategy pattern, and finally I explain how you can implement the Strategy pattern in your own software.

Swing borders

You can draw borders around almost all Swing components, including panels, buttons, lists, and so on. Swing provides numerous border types for its components: bevel, etched, line, titled, and even compound. Borders for Swing components are drawn by the JComponent class, which acts as the base class for all Swing components by implementing functionality common to all Swing components.

JComponent implements paintBorder(), a method for painting borders around components. Swing's creators could have implemented paintBorder() like the method in Example 1:

  • Print
  • Feedback

Resources