Encapsulation lends itself to hierarchical "silos" or "trees" of objects, with a given application's major functionalities decomposed into core trunks, each further decomposed into sub-functionalities instantiated as sub-branch member objects of their respective branches.
As an example, suppose I'm programming a GUI in QT. To separate GUI elements from business logic, for every widget I have a class for the GUI elements, a class for the business logic associated with the GUI elements, and what I'll call a controller which serves as a container for both and exists primarily to pass signals/slots in between. I understand this pattern to be called dependency injection.
Let's suppose our application has 2 windows A and B.
Window A contains 2 independent widgets that have separate business functions i and ii, so we might have the structure A::i and A::ii, where :: is "contains an instance of" and not "extends".
Then i and ii both contain gui and business logic units, so we have A::i::business and A::i::gui.
Now, suppose A::i::business and A::ii::business want to pass information between each other, or engage in bidirectional communication with the model-view for my database, identified as MV. Generally speaking, what are my options for doing this?
What I've thought of so far:
1) Pass signals up and down the tree, i.e., the Verilog solution. This seems the most strictly object oriented, but most tedious.
2) Have a flatter architecture to ease the implementation of solution 1). This hurts encapsulation.
3) Make A::i::business and A::ii::business public all the way down, and have either the other object or a third-party shared class access A::i::business or A::ii:business directly. This hurts encapsulation.
4) Have a relatively unencapsulated object, like the database MV or some other form of "shared storage", exist in a public form near the top level of the program with few/ no super-containers. This seems most appealing, as the relatively encapsulated objects can stay encapsulated and communicate through unidirectional reading/ writing to something that's unencapsulated. However, if I want other objects to perform actions based on changes shared storage, some way of notifying the dependent objects while keeping them private is necessary. This might be called the "multi-threading inspired" or "multi-processing inspired" model of communication.
And any other suggestions you all may have.
I've read this post here, but at my level of understanding, the solutions in the accepted answer such as controller, listener and pub-sub, refer to general design patterns that don't seem to commit to a solution for the concrete problem of how to route signals and make decisions about public/ private accessibility of member classes. It may be the case that these solutions have associated conventions for where the communication objects go and how they access the different variables in either silo that I'm not familiar with.
Most generally speaking, I seem to be running into a general problem of communication across container-trees in well-encapsulated programming.
For future reference, is there a general term for this problem to aide future searching? Is my architectural approach of having the object-container structure directly reflecting the tree-decomposition of application functionality lending itself to too hierarchical a design, and would a different pattern of object containment and cross-branch communication be more optimal?
The object oriented concepts : encapsulation, data abstraction and data hiding are 3 different concepts, but very much related to each other. So i am having difficulty in understanding the concepts fully by reading the information from internet. The information available at one place contradicts with information at another place in the internet. Could someone guide me to a tutorial which clearly explains the 3 concepts and brings out the difference between the three?
First of all, don't be too ambitious ,as you said these 3 concepts are related (especially the first two) and could be used for one another in many contexts. Using them correctly is much more important than having a complete final definition.
"data hiding" is all about putting a wall between the client and (part of) the implementation. Some objects of a module can be internal to the module and invisible to its users. As such, this is a way, a method to avoid dependency. if I cannot know how one thing is implemented, its implementation can change.
"data abstraction" is regrouping different kind of data under the same abstraction. It is close to the idea of a protocol. You don't know how the object is implemented, but you know it respect a well-known protocol, i.e a set of method that works over different type of data. In python, file-like object are a good example. In Java, one uses interfaces. It is good because you have less to learn, and also because you can check some properties at the abstraction level, i.e for all kind of data regrouped under this abstraction.
"encapsulation" is about putting a shell around objects that simplify their usage. it is linked to the idea that objects in a code base can be regrouped in layers increasingly low-level. One object in a layer calls only those of layers beneath him. For example, if you want to draw a line on the screen, the line obkect may only encapsulate an openGL context, the pixel drawer, and other stuff. These lower-level objects are encapsulated by the line object. Note the encapsulation can be applied to the same object when it is part of different layers at the same time, not good but sometimes unavoidable. For example, the file-like object in python have high-level/encapsulating method (open, close, read) and low-levels ones (seek).
That's it. Obviously, the definition of each could be broader but these make the three concepts a bit more different.
The wrapping up of data and functions into a single unit (called
class) is known as encapsulation. Data encapsulation is the most
striking feature of a class. The data is not accessible to the
outside world, and only those functions, which are wrapped in
the class, can access it. These functions provide the interface
between the object’s data and the program. This insulation of
the data from direct access by the program is called data hiding
or information hiding.
Abstraction refers to the act of representing essential features
without including the background details or explanations.
Classes use the concept of abstraction and are defined as a list
of abstract attributes such as size, weight and cost, and
functions to operate on these attributes. They encapsulate all the
essential properties of the objects that are to be created. The
attributes are sometimes called data members because they hold
information. The functions that operate on these data are
sometimes called methods or member functions.
Since the classes use the concept of data abstraction, they are
known as Abstract Data Types (ADT
I am interested in improving my designing capability (designing of classes with its properties, methods etc) for a given.
i.e. How to decide what should be the classes, methods and properties?
Can you guys suggest me good material for improving on this?
Please see:
Any source of good object-oriented design practises?
Best Resources to learn OO Design and Analysis
among many....
Encapsulation: The wrapping up of data and functions into a single unit is known as encapsulation. Or, simply put: putting the data and methods together in a single unit may be a class.
Inheritance: Aquiring the properties from parent class to child class. Or: getting the properties from super class to sub class is known as inheritance.
Polymorphism: The ability to take more that one form, it supports method overloading and method overriding.
Method overloading: When a method in a class having the same method name with different arguments (diff parameters or signatures) is said to be method overloading. This is compile-time polymorphism – using one identifier to refer to multiple items in the same scope.
This is perhaps a question which every programmer thinks of one day.
The designing capability comes with your experience gradually. What I would say is in general scenario if you can visualize the Database objects for a given problem, the rest is a cakewalk (isnt true sometimes if you work on a techie project with no DB)
You can start thinking of objects which are interacting in the real world to complete the process and then map them to classes with appropriate properties and then methods for defining their behavior. Ten you can focus on the classes which contribute to running the workflow and not to any individual real world object.
This gets a lot simplified if we focus on designing the DB before we jump directly to code design.
A lot depends on the pattern you choose - If you see a problem from MVC perspective, you will naturally be drawn towards identifying "controller" classe first and so on.
I guess I need not repeat the golden sources of design and OOPS wisdom - they already posted here or there.
I would recommend you to read up on some UML and design patterns. That gets you going with the thinking in "drawing" terms. You can also get a good grasp of a big class/object a lot easier.
One particular book that is good in this area.
Applying UML and Patterns
Give a look a Domain-Driven Design, which defines entities, value objects, factories, services and repositories and the GRASP patterns (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns) e.g. Expert, Creator, Controller.
Have a look at the part 1 screencast the first part is not silverlight but just a command line calculator that starts out as a single bit of code, and is then broken down into classes.
This is probably a newbie question since I'm new to design patterns but I was looking at the Template Method and Strategy DP's and they seem very similar. I can read the definitions, examine the UML's and check out code examples but to me it seem like the Strategy pattern is just using the Template Method pattern but you just happen to passing it into and object (i.e. composition).
And for that matter the Template Method seems like that is just basic OO inheritance.
Am I missing some key aspect to their differences? Am I missing something about the Template Method that makes it more that just basic inheritance?
Note: There is a previous post on this (672083) but its more on when to use it, which kind of helps me get it a bit more but I want valid my thoughts on the patterns themselves.
It basically all comes down to semantics. The strategy pattern allows you to pass in a particular algorithm/procedure (the strategy) to another object and that will use it. The template method allows you to override particular aspects of an algorithm while still keeping certain aspects of it the same (keep the order the same, and have things that are always done at the start and end for example... the 'template') while inheritance is a way of modelling 'IS-A' relationships in data models.
Certainly, template methods are most easily implemented using inheritance (although you could just as easily use composition, especially once you have functors), and strategy patterns are frequently also template methods but where the syntax is similar the meanings are vastly different.
The Strategy design pattern
provides a way to exchange the algorithm of an object
dynamically at run-time
(via object composition).
For example, calculating prices in an order processing system.
To calculate prices in different ways,
different pricing algorithms can be supported
so that which algorithm to use can be selected (injected) and exchanged dynamically at run-time.
The Template Method
design pattern
provides a way to
redefine some parts of the behavior of a class statically at compile-time
(via subclassing).
For example, designing reusable applications (frameworks).
The application implements the common (invariant) parts of the behavior
so that users of the application can write subclasses to redefine
the variant parts to suit their needs.
But subclass writers should neither be able to change the invariant parts of
the behavior nor the behavior's structure
(the structure of invariant and variant parts).
By putting functionality into a function, does that alone constitute an example of encapsulation or do you need to use objects to have encapsulation?
I'm trying to understand the concept of encapsulation. What I thought was if I go from something like this:
n = n + 1
which is executed out in the wild as part of a big body of code and then I take that, and put it in a function such as this one, then I have encapsulated that addition logic in a method:
addOne(n)
n = n + 1
return n
Or is it more the case that it is only encapsulation if I am hiding the details of addOne from the outside world - like if it is an object method and I use an access modifier of private/protected?
I will be the first to disagree with what seems to be the answer trend. Yes, a function encapsulates some amount of implementation. You don't need an object (which I think you use to mean a class).
See Meyers too.
Perhaps you are confusing abstraction with encapsulation, which is understood in the broader context of object orientation.
Encapsulation properly includes all three of the following:
Abstraction
Implementation Hiding
Division of Responsibility
Abstraction is only one component of encapsulation. In your example you have abstracted the adding functionality from the main body of code in which it once resided. You do this by identifying some commonality in the code - recognizing a concept (addition) over a specific case (adding the number one to the variable n). Because of this ability, abstraction makes an encapsulated component - a method or an object - reusable.
Equally important to the notion of encapsulation is the idea of implementation hiding. This is why encapsulation is discussed in the arena of object orientation. Implementation hiding protects an object from its users and vice versa. In OO, you do this by presenting an interface of public methods to the users of your object, while the implementation of the object takes place inside private methods.
This serves two benefits. First, by limiting access to your object, you avoid a situation where users of the object can leave the object in an invalid state. Second, from the user's perspective, when they use your object they are only loosely coupled to it - if you change your implementation later on, they are not impacted.
Finally, division of responsility - in the broader context of an OO design - is something that must be considered to address encapsulation properly. It's no use encapsulating a random collection of functions - responsibility needs to be cleanly and logically defined so that there is as little overlap or ambiguity as possible. For example, if we have a Toilet object we will want to wall off its domain of responsibilities from our Kitchen object.
In a limited sense, though, you are correct that a function, let's say, 'modularizes' some functionality by abstracting it. But, as I've said, 'encapsulation' as a term is understood in the broader context of object orientation to apply to a form of modularization that meets the three criteria listed above.
Sure it is.
For example, a method that operates only on its parameters would be considered "better encapsulated" than a method that operates on global static data.
Encapsulation has been around long before OOP :)
A method is no more an example of encapsulation than a car is an example of good driving. Encapsulation isn't about the synax, it is a logical design issue. Both objects and methods can exhibit good and bad encapsulation.
The simplest way to think about it is whether the code hides/abstracts the details from other parts of the code that don't have a need to know/care about the implementation.
Going back to the car example:
Automatic transmission offers good encapsulation: As a driver you care about forward/back and speed.
Manual Transmission is bad encapsulation: From the driver's perspective the specific gear required for low/high speeds is generally irrelevant to the intent of the driver.
No, objects aren't required for encapsulation. In the very broadest sense, "encapsulation" just means "hiding the details from view" and in that regard a method is encapsulating its implementation details.
That doesn't really mean you can go out and say your code is well-designed just because you divided it up into methods, though. A program consisting of 500 public methods isn't much better than that same program implemented in one 1000-line method.
In building a program, regardless of whether you're using object oriented techniques or not, you need to think about encapsulation at many different places: hiding the implementation details of a method, hiding data from code that doesn't need to know about it, simplifying interfaces to modules, etc.
Update: To answer your updated question, both "putting code in a method" and "using an access modifier" are different ways of encapsulating logic, but each one acts at a different level.
Putting code in a method hides the individual lines of code that make up that method so that callers don't need to care about what those lines are; they only worry about the signature of the method.
Flagging a method on a class as (say) "private" hides that method so that a consumer of the class doesn't need to worry about it; they only worry about the public methods (or properties) of your class.
The abstract concept of encapsulation means that you hide implementation details. Object-orientation is but one example of the use of ecnapsulation. Another example is the language called module-2 that uses (or used) implementation modules and definition modules. The definition modules hid the actual implementation and therefore provided encapsulation.
Encapsulation is used when you can consider something a black box. Objects are a black box. You know the methods they provide, but not how they are implemented.
[EDIT]
As for the example in the updated question: it depends on how narrow or broad you define encapsulation. Your AddOne example does not hide anything I believe. It would be information hiding/encapsulation if your variable would be an array index and you would call your method moveNext and maybe have another function setValue and getValue. This would allow people (together maybe with some other functions) to navigate your structure and setting and getting variables with them being aware of you using an array. If you programming language would support other or richer concepts you could change the implementation of moveNext, setValue and getValue with changing the meaning and the interface. To me that is encapsulation.
It's a component-level thing
Check this out:
In computer science, Encapsulation is the hiding of the internal mechanisms and data structures of a software component behind a defined interface, in such a way that users of the component (other pieces of software) only need to know what the component does, and cannot make themselves dependent on the details of how it does it. The purpose is to achieve potential for change: the internal mechanisms of the component can be improved without impact on other components, or the component can be replaced with a different one that supports the same public interface.
(I don't quite understand your question, let me know if that link doesn't cover your doubts)
Let's simplify this somewhat with an analogy: you turn the key of your car and it starts up. You know that there's more to it than just the key, but you don't have to know what is going on in there. To you, key turn = motor start. The interface of the key (that is, e.g., the function call) hides the implementation of the starter motor spinning the engine, etc... (the implementation). That's encapsulation. You're spared from having to know what's going on under the hood, and you're happy for it.
If you created an artificial hand, say, to turn the key for you, that's not encapsulation. You're turning the key with additional middleman cruft without hiding anything. That's what your example reminds me of - it's not encapsulating implementation details, even though both are accomplished through function calls. In this example, anyone picking up your code will not thank you for it. They will, in fact, be more likely to club you with your artificial hand.
Any method you can think of to hide information (classes, functions, dynamic libraries, macros) can be used for encapsulation.
Encapsulation is a process in which attributes(data member) and behavior(member function) of a objects in combined together as a single entity refer as class.
The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing - written by the International Organisation for Standardization - defines the following concepts:
Entity: Any concrete or abstract thing of interest.
Object: A model of an entity. An object is characterised by its behaviour and, dually, by its state.
Behaviour (of an object): A collection of actions with a set of constraints on when they may occur.
Interface: An abstraction of the behaviour of an object that consists of a subset of the interactions of that object together with a set of constraints on when they may occur.
Encapsulation: the property that the information contained in an object is accessible only through interactions at the interfaces supported by the object.
These, you will appreciate, are quite broad. Let us see, however, whether putting functionality within a function can logically be considered to constitute towards encapsulation in these terms.
Firstly, a function is clearly a model of a, 'Thing of interest,' in that it represents an algorithm you (presumably) desire executed and that algorithm pertains to some problem you are trying to solve (and thus is a model of it).
Does a function have behaviour? It certainly does: it contains a collection of actions (which could be any number of executable statements) that are executed under the constraint that the function must be called from somewhere before it can execute. A function may not spontaneously be called at any time, without causal factor. Sounds like legalese? You betcha. But let's plough on, nonetheless.
Does a function have an interface? It certainly does: it has a name and a collection of formal parameters, which in turn map to the executable statements contained in the function in that, once a function is called, the name and parameter list are understood to uniquely identify the collection of executable statements to be run without the calling party's specifying those actual statements.
Does a function have the property that the information contained in the function is accessible only through interactions at the interfaces supported by the object? Hmm, well, it can.
As some information is accessible via its interface, some information must be hidden and inaccessible within the function. (The property such information exhibits is called information hiding, which Parnas defined by arguing that modules should be designed to hide both difficult decisions and decisions that are likely to change.) So what information is hidden within a function?
To see this, we should first consider scale. It's easy to claim that, for example, Java classes can be encapsulated within a package: some of the classes will be public (and hence be the package's interface) and some will be package-private (and hence information-hidden within the package). In encapsulation theory, the classes form nodes and the packages form encapsulated regions, with the entirety forming an encapsulated graph; the graph of classes and packages is called the third graph.
It's also easy to claim that functions (or methods) themselves are encapsulated within classes. Again, some functions will be public (and hence be part of the class's interface) and some will be private (and hence information-hidden within the class). The graph of functions and classes is called the second graph.
Now we come to functions. If functions are to be a means of encapsulation themselves they they should contain some information public to other functions and some information that's information-hidden within the function. What could this information be?
One candidate is given to us by McCabe. In his landmark paper on cyclomatic complexity, Thomas McCabe describes source code where, 'Each node in the graph corresponds to a block of code in the program where the flow is sequential and the arcs correspond to branches taken in the program.'
Let us take the McCabian block of sequential execution as the unit of information that may be encapsulated within a function. As the first block within the function is always the first and only guaranteed block to be executed, we can consider the first block to be public, in that it may be called by other functions. All the other blocks within the function, however, cannot be called by other functions (except in languages that allow jumping into functions mid-flow) and so these blocks may be considered information-hidden within the function.
Taking these (perhaps slightly tenuous) definitions, then we may say yes: putting functionality within a function does constitute to encapsulation. The encapsulation of blocks within functions is the first graph.
There is a caveate, however. Would you consider a package whose every class was public to be encapsulated? According to the definitions above, it does pass the test, as you can say that the interface to the package (i.e., all the public classes) do indeed offer a subset of the package's behaviour to other packages. But the subset in this case is the entire package's behaviour, as no classes are information-hidden. So despite regorously satisfying the above definitions, we feel that it does not satisfy the spirit of the definitions, as surely something must be information-hidden for true encapsulation to be claimed.
The same is true for the exampe you give. We can certainly consider n = n + 1 to be a single McCabian block, as it (and the return statement) are a single, sequential flow of executions. But the function into which you put this thus contains only one block, and that block is the only public block of the function, and therefore there are no information-hidden blocks within your proposed function. So it may satisfy the definition of encapsulation, but I would say that it does not satisfy the spirit.
All this, of course, is academic unless you can prove a benefit such encapsulation.
There are two forces that motivate encapsulation: the semantic and the logical.
Semantic encapsulation merely means encapsulation based on the meaning of the nodes (to use the general term) encapsulated. So if I tell you that I have two packages, one called, 'animal,' and one called 'mineral,' and then give you three classes Dog, Cat and Goat and ask into which packages these classes should be encapsulated, then, given no other information, you would be perfectly right to claim that the semantics of the system would suggest that the three classes be encapsulated within the, 'animal,' package, rather than the, 'mineral.'
The other motivation for encapsulation, however, is logic.
The configuration of a system is the precise and exhaustive identification of each node of the system and the encapsulated region in which it resides; a particular configuration of a Java system is - at the third graph - to identify all the classes of the system and specify the package in which each class resides.
To logically encapsulate a system means to identify some mathematical property of the system that depends on its configuration and then to configure that system so that the property is mathematically minimised.
Encapsulation theory proposes that all encapsulated graphs express a maximum potential number of edges (MPE). In a Java system of classes and packages, for example, the MPE is the maximum potential number of source code dependencies that can exist between all the classes of that system. Two classes within the same package cannot be information-hidden from one another and so both may potentially form depdencies on one another. Two package-private classes in separate packages, however, may not form dependencies on one another.
Encapsulation theory tells us how many packages we should have for a given number of classes so that the MPE is minimised. This can be useful because the weak form of the Principle of Burden states that the maximum potential burden of transforming a collection of entities is a function of the maximum potential number of entities transformed - in other words, the more potential source code dependencies you have between your classes, the greater the potential cost of doing any particular update. Minimising the MPE thus minimises the maximum potential cost of updates.
Given n classes and a requirement of p public classes per package, encapsulation theory shows that the number of packages, r, we should have to minimise the MPE is given by the equation: r = sqrt(n/p).
This also applies to the number of functions you should have, given the total number, n, of McCabian blocks in your system. Functions always have just one public block, as we mentioned above, and so the equation for the number of functions, r, to have in your system simplifies to: r = sqrt(n).
Admittedly, few considered the total number of blocks in their system when practicing encapsulation, but it's readily done at the class/package level. And besides, minimising MPE is almost entirely entuitive: it's done by minimising the number of public classes and trying to uniformly distribute classes over packages (or at least avoid have most packages with, say, 30 classes, and one monster pacakge with 500 classes, in which case the internal MPE of the latter can easily overwhelm the MPE of all the others).
Encapsulation thus involves striking a balance between the semantic and the logical.
All great fun.
in strict object-oriented terminology, one might be tempted to say no, a "mere" function is not sufficiently powerful to be called encapsulation...but in the real world the obvious answer is "yes, a function encapsulates some code".
for the OO purists who bristle at this blasphemy, consider a static anonymous class with no state and a single method; if the AddOne() function is not encapsulation, then neither is this class!
and just to be pedantic, encapsulation is a form of abstraction, not vice-versa. ;-)
It's not normally very meaningful to speak of encapsulation without reference to properties rather than solely methods -- you can put access controls on methods, certainly, but it's difficult to see how that's going to be other than nonsensical without any data scoped to the encapsulated method. Probably you could make some argument validating it, but I suspect it would be tortuous.
So no, you're most likely not using encapsulation just because you put a method in a class rather than having it as a global function.