Spring Framework

Keeping it Simple

I've always been one of those perhaps slightly annoying people who don't easily accept propositions that seem overly intricate. It's not that I'm a stroppy person - I'm pretty relaxed really - I just don't like wastefulness, and that can mean I'm unhappy when I see other people wasting their time doing things the hard way. I suppose I was trained this way by the years I spent working with the Occam programming language, a language that espouses explicitly the avoidance of complexity by making behavioural semantics really clear to the developer.

Interfaces - no need to know exactly who you're talking to

I wrote about the Spring Framework Mission Statement earlier. This article follows it by examining the second Spring mission statement bullet, which concerns the use of interfaces in Java: It’s best to program to interfaces, rather than classes. Spring reduces the complexity cost of using interfaces to zero. Everyone knows this is a Good Thing - but why is it good? The answer lies in achieving decoupling. Object oriented programming in Java draws on the precedent set by Smalltalk in which objects communicate by passing messages.