Sunday, November 25, 2007

Inheritance, Dependency, Association, Aggregation, Composition....a comparative study...

The ‘is a’ relationship is expressed with inheritance and ‘has a’ relationship is expressed with composition. Both inheritance and composition allow you to place sub-objects inside your new class. Two of the main techniques for code reuse are class inheritance and object composition.
Inheritance is uni-directional. For example House is a Building. But Building is not a House. Inheritance uses extends key word.
Composition: is used when House has a Bathroom. It is incorrect to say House is a Bathroom. Composition simply means using instance variables that refer to other objects. The class House will have an instance variable, which refers to a Bathroom object.

Which one to use?
Inheritance should be only used when subclass ‘is a’ superclass.
􀂃 Don’t use inheritance just to get code reuse. If there is no ‘is a’ relationship then use composition for code reuse. Overuse of implementation inheritance (uses the “extends” key word) can break all the subclasses, if the superclass is modified.
􀂃 Do not use inheritance just to get polymorphism. If there is no ‘is a’ relationship and all you want is polymorphism then use interface inheritance with composition, which gives you code reuse.


Difference between dependency, association,aggregation and composition:


Though Java is a true object-oriented language that thoroughly supports inheritance, careful thought should be given to the use of this feature, since in many cases an alternative is to use a more flexible object relationship. The commonly identified object relationships are as follows:
a) dependency
b) association
c) aggregation
d) composition

The distinction between these relationships is based on the duration and the nature of the relationship.
The aggregation and composition relationships involve a tighter binding between the related objects. The related objects have a long-term relationship and have some level of mutual dependency, which may be exclusive, that defines their existence.

Dependency
An object dependency exists when there is a short-term relationship between the objects. For instance, the relationship between a shopping cart and a checkout object would be short term, since once the checkout operation is complete, the checkout object would no longer be needed. The same relationship would exist for a stock transfer object that needed to use a stock item object to get the information on the stock item being transferred. The stock transfer object would have a dependency relationship with the stock item object; the stock transfer object would read the transfer information and could then discard the stock item object and continue processing.













AssociationAn object association represents a more long-term association than the dependency relationship. The controlling object will obtain a reference to the association object and then use the reference to call methods on the object. The relationship between a car and a driver is representative of this relationship. The car will have a driver who will be associated with the car for a period of time.




Aggregation is an association in which one class belongs to a collection. This is a part of a whole
relationship where a part can exist without a whole. With an aggregation relationship, the contained object is part of the greater whole. There is a mutual dependency between the two objects, but the contained object can participate in other aggregate relationships and may exist independently of the whole. For example, a FileReader object that has been created using a File object represents a mutual dependency where the two objects combine to create a useful mechanism for reading characters from a file. The UML symbols for expressing this relationship as shown in following figure which involve a line connecting the two classes with a diamond at the object that represents the greater whole.




Composition is an association in which one class belongs to a collection. This is a part of a whole relationship where a part cannot exist without a whole. If a whole is deleted then all parts are deleted. So composition has a stronger relationship.
With the composition relationship, the client object is owned by the greater whole. The contained object cannot participate in more than one compositional relationship. An example of this is a customer object and its related address object; the address object cannot exist without a customer object. This relationship is shown with a darkened diamond at the object, which represents the greater whole, as shown in the follwing figure


....will be updating with example code later.....

Java Tools Collections

Users can find all tools realted to java at this link
http://javatoolbox.com/categories

For example, if you are looking for some testing tool, but not sure which one to use or from where to get, you can check it here
http://javatoolbox.com/categories/tests




Friday, November 2, 2007

Common causes for memory leaks in Java applications

1) Unbounded caches
A very simple example of a memory leak would be a java.util.Collection object (for example, a HashMap) that is acting as a cache but which is growing without any bounds.

public class MyClass {
static HashSet myContainer = new HashSet();
public void leak(int numObjects) {
for (int i = 0; i < numObjects; ++i) {
String leakingUnit = new String("this is leaking object: " + i);
myContainer.add(leakingUnit);
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
{
MyClass myObj = new MyClass();
myObj.leak(100000); // One hundred thousand
}
System.gc();
}


In the above program, there is a class with the name MyClass which has a static reference to HashSet by the name of myContainer. In the main method of the class: MyClass, (in bold text) within which an instance of the class: MyClass is instantiated and its member operation: leak is invoked. This results in the addition of a hundred thousand String objects into the container: myContainer. After the program control exits the subscope, the instance of the MyClass object is garbage collected, because there are no references to that instance of the MyClass object outside that subscope. However, the MyClass class object has a static reference to the member variable called myContainer. Due to this static reference, the myContainer HashSet continues to persist in the Java heap even after the sole instance of the MyClass object has been garbage collected and, along with the HashSet, all the String objects inside the HashSet continue to persist, holding up a significant portion of the Java heap until the program exits the main method.

This program demonstrates a basic memory leaking operation involving an unbounded growth in a cache object. Most caches are implemented using the Singleton pattern involving a static reference to a top level Cache class as shown in this example.


Here is the GC information for you for the above snippet....

[GC 512K->253K(1984K), 0.0018368 secs]
[GC 765K->467K(1984K), 0.0015165 secs]
[GC 979K->682K(1984K), 0.0016116 secs]
[GC 1194K->900K(1984K), 0.0015495 secs]
[GC 1412K->1112K(1984K), 0.0015553 secs]
[GC 1624K->1324K(1984K), 0.0014902 secs]
[GC 1836K->1537K(2112K), 0.0016068 secs]
[Full GC 1537K->1537K(2112K), 0.0120419 secs]
[GC 2047K->1824K(3136K), 0.0019275 secs]
[GC 2336K->2035K(3136K), 0.0016584 secs]
[GC 2547K->2248K(3136K), 0.0015602 secs]
[GC 2760K->2461K(3136K), 0.0015517 secs]
[GC 2973K->2673K(3264K), 0.0015695 secs]
[Full GC 2673K->2673K(3264K), 0.0144533 secs]
[GC 3185K->2886K(5036K), 0.0013183 secs]
[GC 3398K->3098K(5036K), 0.0015822 secs]
[GC 3610K->3461K(5036K), 0.0028318 secs]
[GC 3973K->3673K(5036K), 0.0019273 secs]
[GC 4185K->3885K(5036K), 0.0019377 secs]
[GC 4397K->4097K(5036K), 0.0012906 secs]
[GC 4609K->4309K(5036K), 0.0017647 secs]
[GC 4821K->4521K(5036K), 0.0017731 secs]
[Full GC 4521K->4521K(5036K), 0.0222485 secs]
[GC 4971K->4708K(8012K), 0.0042461 secs]
[GC 5220K->4920K(8012K), 0.0018258 secs]
[GC 5432K->5133K(8012K), 0.0018648 secs]
[GC 5645K->5345K(8012K), 0.0018069 secs]
[GC 5857K->5558K(8012K), 0.0017825 secs]
[GC 6070K->5771K(8012K), 0.0018911 secs]
[GC 6283K->5984K(8012K), 0.0016350 secs]
[GC 6496K->6197K(8012K), 0.0020342 secs]
[GC 6475K->6312K(8012K), 0.0013560 secs]
[Full GC 6312K->6118K(8012K), 0.0341375 secs]
[GC 6886K->6737K(11032K), 0.0045417 secs]
[GC 7505K->7055K(11032K), 0.0027473 secs]
[GC 7823K->7374K(11032K), 0.0028045 secs]
[GC 8142K->7693K(11032K), 0.0029234 secs]
[GC 8461K->8012K(11032K), 0.0027353 secs]
[GC 8780K->8331K(11032K), 0.0027790 secs]
[GC 9099K->8651K(11032K), 0.0028329 secs]
[GC 9419K->8970K(11032K), 0.0027895 secs]
[GC 9738K->9289K(11032K), 0.0028037 secs]
[GC 10057K->9608K(11032K), 0.0028161 secs]
[GC 10376K->9927K(11032K), 0.0028482 secs]
[GC 10695K->10246K(11032K), 0.0028858 secs]
[GC 11014K->10565K(11416K), 0.0029284 secs]
[Full GC 10565K->10565K(11416K), 0.0506198 secs]
[GC 11781K->11071K(18956K), 0.0035594 secs]
[GC 12287K->11577K(18956K), 0.0042315 secs]
[GC 12793K->12082K(18956K), 0.0043194 secs]
[GC 12843K->12390K(18956K), 0.0030633 secs]
[GC 13606K->13494K(18956K), 0.0085937 secs]
[Full GC 13782K->13613K(18956K), 0.0646513 secs]




2) Infinite Loops

Some memory leaks occur due to program errors in which infinite loop in the application code allocates new objects and adds them to a data structure accessible from outside the program loop scope. This type of infinite loops can sometimes occur due to multithreaded access into a shared unsynchronized data structure. These types of memory leaks manifest as fast growing memory leaks, where if the verbose GC data reports a sharp drop in free heap space in a very short time leads to an OutOfMemoryError.
Friends please add more to this post... dying to see more in this post....

Simple performance improvement suggestions.

I have found the following simple way of making small improvements to performance for projects in the past.


- Use Boolean.valueOf(b) instead of new Boolean(b)
Note: however, some classes use a flag and rely on new Boolean() object being
different. A bad practice
synchronized(myInRelServFlg) {
myInRelServFlg = new Boolean(theFlg.booleanValue());
}

- Avoid the use of new String(String)
- Avoid the use of a single character String in a string concatenation. Or better
yet use StringBuilder where possible. Most times the synchronization from
StringBuffer is not required. Sun just released StringBuilder in 1.5, an
unsynchronized variant of StringBuffer.

- Avoid the use of StringBuffer().toString() in string concatenation.
- Avoid creating temproary objects to convert to a String or from a String. E.g. new
Integer(int).toString() and new Integer(String).intValue()
- Use constants for zero length arrays rather than creating the dynamically. Note:
however, some classes use zero length array objects for locks. A bad practice
terminationLock = new int[0];

- Avoid the use of loop to copy arrays, use System.arraycopy() instead.
- Avoid creating an instance of a class just to get the classes name. e.g.
(new java.sql.Date(123456)).getClass().getName ()

-About the history of Vector: Vector was in the 1.0 libraries
By the time of 1.2 ArrayList had come along and people were switching to it for
better performance. Vector was synchronised and because of that slower than the
unsynchronised ArrayList.
By the time of 1.4 however the synchronisation mechanism was much much better -
and Vector actually had a slight performance advantage over ArrayList.

-Performance with inner classes: When considering whether to use an inner class,
keep in mind that application startup time and memory footprint are typically
directly proportional to the number of classes you load. The more classes you
create, the longer your program takes to start up and the more memory it will take.
As an application developer one has to balance this with other design constraints
the person may have. I am not suggesting you turn your application into a single
monolithic class in hopes of cutting down startup time and memory footprint — this
would lead to unnecessary headaches and maintenance burdens.

Does anyone have any comments or other suggestions?

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