leah blogs

(Ok, I admit I’ve always wanted to write a post with a title like “Design and Evolution of …” or “Structure and Implementation of …”. :-))

In the last two weeks, I’ve been writing (yet) another Dependency Injection framework for Ruby dubbed Dissident. Based on my experience with Needle (which I used for writing Nukumi2) and quite a deal of inspiration by Java frameworks, especially PicoContainer, I think I made one of the most “rubyish” frameworks available.

What is the deal with Dependency Injection? DI tries to solve one of the oldest problems of object-oriented programming: Decoupling objects. Probably every half-serious OO programmer got to know that often you need to pass a fair amount of objects to the classes you instantiate, just because they need them; the class that instantiates doesn’t. All this passing-around is, in the end, unneeded code that wastes time and attracts bugs. Also, what happens if you suddenly need to replace the actual implementations? (Admittedly, it’s not that bad with dynamic languages and duck-typing, but in a static language, I hope you have your interfaces handy. Nevertheless, concentrating instantiation makes your application easier to maintain. Tomorrow your PHB tells you he wants to use that “new logging library” everywhere. It’s really nice if you can do that by changing a single line. [1])

Currently, there are two popular (and generally considered being good) approaches to this problem: Setter Injection and Constructor Injection.

• Setter Injection creates new instances and injects the dependencies of them by using setters. Without a DI framework, you would use the class like this in Ruby:

  class Application
    attr_writer :logger
    def do_stuff
      logger.log "doing stuff"
    end
  end
  a = Application.new
  a.logger = Logger.new
  a.do_stuff
  

  As you can see, this is a straight-forward way to do DI, and also the default one used in my framework. (Well, almost; see below.)

• Constructor Injection was popularized by PicoContainer, and is considered more “clean” by many people.

  class Application
    def initialize(logger)
      @logger = logger
    end
    def do_stuff
      @logger.log "doing stuff"
    end
  end
  a = Application.new(Logger.new)
  a.do_stuff
  

  Constructor Injection is available for Dissident too, but not the default mechanism because unlike Java and (at least to an extent) Python, Ruby does not provide mechanisms to access the parameter names and types of methods.

  Constructor Injection is actually more work to code for in a dynamic language like Ruby, at least in comparison to Setter Injection (count the occurrences of logger in above classes).

As mentioned, Dissident does not implement mere Setter Injection, but an extension of it that is only possible in dynamic languages; I call it Method Injection: Dissident extends the classes that use DI to provide methods that return the requested services. Therefore, the Dissident code to make use of the first example would look like this:

class Application
  inject :logger
  def do_stuff
    logger.log "doing stuff"
  end
end

class MyContainer < Dissident::Container
  provide :logger, Logger
end

Dissident.with MyContainer do
  a = Application.new
  a.do_stuff
end

You can stop goggling now. :-) You probably expected something like that:

container = MyContainer.new
# mumble mumble
a = container.application

Not so in Dissident! Dissident tries to completely stay out of your code. Rubyists duck-type class instantiation on #new, and there is no reason to change that when using a DI framework.

So, what happens now exactly? The Dissident.with block makes an instance of MyContainer (a plain old Ruby class) the current container. Now, all “dissidentized” classes (Application here) can access it. The inject line in the class definition of Application defines a “getter” for the logger, which is provided by the container as an instance of Logger.

In fact, instead of that provide line, you could as well write something along this:

class MyContainer < Dissident::Container
  def logger
    Logger.new
  end
end

…which does in above case exactly the same, but provide allows for some more subtleties.

The code as seen is not independent of Dissident, but that can be fixed in three easy ways:

• Redefine inject as attr_writer (e.g. with class Class; alias_method :inject, :attr_writer; end), and you can use standard Setter Injection,

• rescue calls to inject (possibly falling back to attr_writer), or

• use Constructor Injection.

To make use of Constructor Injection in Dissident, just tell provide the services you want to pass; in above case you now must let Dissident actually construct the application itself, therefore we need to register it too:

class MyContainer < Dissident::Container
  provide :logger, Logger
  provide :application, Application, :logger
end

Dissident.with MyContainer do |container|
  a = container.application
  a.do_stuff
end

As you can see, Constructor Injection is the more “pure” approach, but a bit more work and not as transparent as Method Injection. You can mix both freely when using Dissident, though.

Another nice thing Dissident provides are parametrized services, simply define a method in your container, and it will get a multiton with a life-time of the container. This only works with Method Injection.

class MyContainer < Dissident::Container
  def logger(level=:debug)
    SuperFancyLogger.new(:level => level)
  end
end

class Application
  inject :logger
  def do_stuff
    logger.log "This is just for debugging."
    logger(:alert).log "Core meltdown."
  end
end

What happens when you need more than one container? You may, for example, want to use a library that makes use of Dissident while independently using it in your own application too. Dissident solves this by having the classes declare their association with library:

class AGreatLibrary
  library AGreatLibrary
end
class AGreatLibraryHelper
  library AGreatLibrary
end

Dissident.with MyContainer, AGreatLibrary => AGreatContainer do
  Application.new           # uses MyContainer
  AGreatLibrary.new         # uses AGreatContainer
  AGreatLibraryHelper.new   # uses AGreatContainer, too
end

If it is likely that AGreatLibrary always uses AGreatContainer, you can declare this too, then the user doesn’t need to care about it (but still can override manually, of course):

class AGreatLibrary
  library AGreatLibrary
  default_container AGreatContainer
end

Now, I showed you the most of the things Dissident can do. And these are probably 90% of the things you’ll ever need when using Dissident. Additional features are included as separate files, I wrote a basic lifecycle management and support for multi-methods, that allow even easier parametrization of services; more about that will follow in a later post.

So much about the design of Dissident, now a bit more about the evolution. I don’t think any library or application I ever wrote changed so much without a rewrite. When I started to write Dissident, it was a tiny library that would only do Setter Injection with instance variables. Then, I noticed this approach was too inflexible as it didn’t support parametrized services. First, I used define_method on the singletons the container instantiated, but that’s inefficient, and far too invasive. The next step was to extend them with Modules, first dynamically generated, then named for marshaling purposes. I have to admit it took me a fair time to recognize that I could define the getters directly on the classes. After some more playing and reading about PicoContainer, I decided to add Constructor Injection too; that was fortunately rather easy.

But why write a new DI framework at all? There are some prejudices in the Ruby community with respect to that. People say “they make things complicated” and “there are more frameworks than users”. Of course, that may be true—but it shouldn’t be for all of them. Therefore, I decided to make one that’s not complicated, because you barely notice using it (It’s true that use of DI frameworks often significantly changes the code), one that’s easy to pickup, because you can learn it in an afternoon and only need to write a few additional lines of Ruby—no XML or YAML needed, one that actually helps coding, because else it’s a hobble and therefore no fun, one that eases testing, because you can mock the services easily (don’t use a container at all, or simply inject mocks), one that feels like Ruby, because you should never tangle in bad ports of Java libraries; in the end, I decided to make one that I personally like and want to use, because there is no point in making libraries you don’t use on your own.

Still, Dissident is no silver bullet—there is no panacea. If your design is broken, the best libraries can’t change that. But I think that when you use Dissident, and use it as it was meant to be, it can help you show the rough edges of your design earlier than when you sit over half a dozen napkins, desperately trying to untangle your class relationships. (You’ll quickly notice when your container definitions get ugly.)

Another thing among the reasons I wrote my own Dependency Injection framework was the size of the existing ones. Needle with its 1200 LOC doesn’t count as “lightweight” in my opinion anymore—it already is in the mid-size non-invasive team. (It is very good, though. Use it if you think Dissident is not enough or too extreme/weird/fancy/magic/inflexible for you.) Dissident on the other side is one 200 LOC file for the core right now, and maybe 100 LOC for the additional features. The core is unlikely to grow much in future (one thing that probably needs a bunch of code is makeing everything thread-safe), it does basically everything that is needed. Therefore, it does no harm to just include Dissident in your package, that’s one dependency less and you have everything you need.

[1] And that’s the crux with DI, you only know you would have needed it when it’s too late. It’s good if you have a very easy framework then; especially if it’s one that you actually want to use.

NP: Dan Bern—Crossroads