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Re: Re: Re: Flyweights - different meaning in perl?by demerphq (Chancellor) |
on Dec 15, 2002 at 20:50 UTC ( [id://220046]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Which would be annoying. One of the main advantages of the design pattern movement for me is the development of a common vocabularly (finally, everybody knows what a singleton is :-). If it means something different in the perl world it would be useful to know. Well following this thread, and diotalevis comment I did a little research into the flyweight pattern. And it would seem that there are two different ideas being discussed. Its possible (and I think likely) that the concepts were originally the same, but I suspect the design pattern movement redefined and extended the concept from its earlier use. But i have little evidence to back up this hunch. Heres a quote from a design pattern site about the design pattern schools concept of a flyweight pattern
Overview of Design Patterns however this concept seems to be different from that briefly mentioned elsewhere and more importantly discussed in TheDamians book Object Oriented Perl. I think the later is the source of many peoples concept of the flyweight pattern in Perl, and probably derives from the earlier usage of the term "flyweght".
However, the flyweight pattern still has something to offer in Perl, because it provides a simple mechanism for preventing direct access to abject attributes, thereby enforcing encapsulation. As a bonus, it also provides a means of easily keeping track of every object in a class, something closure-based encapsulation doesnt provide. He then goes on to frame an object model that he calls the Flyweight Pattern. The idea of this is simple. Instead of storing attribute data in the object directly an object only holds a key into a lexically held hash that holds all of the objects for the class. The accessors extract this key from the object and then use it to look up the real object from the privately held table. In his example he uses soldiers and their ids, with a reference to the ID being blessed. (He points out that this has the weakness that it provides a means to violate encapsulation as an object can magicaly "transform" itself into using a different set of attributes. He discusses various approaches to making this less likely or impossible.) Now the pattern he describes is still compliant with the both usgaes of "flyweight". Two distinct objects can share attributes, furthermore the actually item that represents the object is "small" from an outside POV, even if the fact that its blessed is ignored. So I think this is a stuation that is similar to the term "closure" in perl. Generally speaking closures in Perlspeak are the same thing as closures in CSspeak. However all too often you see the term used as a synonym for "anonymous subroutine". In fact I would say that most non CS types would volunteer this is a defintion for a closure (assuming they knew what one was at all.) And just as much as this usage is a distortion and oversimplification of the real concept of "closure", I think that the term flywieght pattern has come to reflect primarily the idea of indexing a class specific lexically held register of objects, and not so much the idea of sharing attribute data between those objects. So from that point of view I would say its obvious that InsideOut objects fits that pattern. But.... And this is where I take the other point of view, and try to answer diotalevis question
Furthermore, Abigail-IIs pattern means that we can wrap an arbitrary number of InsideOut subclasses around any class/object. InsideOut objects fundamentally don't care about what item their blessed reference points at. However the flyweight pattern the data is small for sure, but it is very relevent to the objects internal state. You couldn't just wrap the Soldier class in TheDamians book around an IO::File object for instance. You could however do so with his BaseballPlayer example. So to sum up, the flyweight pattern in perl seems to focus on aspects that design pattern enthusiasts will see as inconsequential, but it still shares the same underlying ideas. InisdeOut objects are in my opinion not flyweight objects from the design pattern point of view, but have similar enough perl implementations that they are easily mistaken as being the same. Updated: Minor typographical errors have been corrected.
--- demerphq
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