2.1.1.1. Principles of Object Oriented Programming¶

There are many views on the main features and motivations for object oriented programming [1] [2]. There are 4 principles that apply to most:

Encapsulation:

Encapsulation refers to the creation of self-contained modules (classes) that bind processing functions to its data members. The data within each class is kept private. Each class defines rules for what is publicly visible and what modifications are allowed.

Inheritance:

Classes may be created in hierarchies, and inheritance lets the structure and methods in one class pass down the class hierarchy. By inheriting code, complex behaviors emerge through the reuse of code in a parent class. If a step is added at the bottom of a hierarchy, only the processing and data associated with that unique step must be added. Everything else above that step may be inherited. Reuse is considered a major advantage of object orientation.

Polymorphism:

Object oriented programming lets programmers create procedures for objects whose exact type is not known until runtime. For example, a screen cursor may change its shape from an arrow to a line depending on the program mode. The routine to move the cursor on screen in response to mouse movement can be written for “cursor”, and polymorphism lets the right version for the given shape be called.

Abstraction:

An abstraction denotes the essential characteristics of an object that distinguish it from all other kinds of objects and thus provide crisply defined conceptual boundaries, relative to the perspective of the viewer. [Booch]

Abstraction denotes a model, a view, or some other focused representation for an actual item. It’s the development of a software object to represent an object we can find in the real world. Encapsulation hides the details of that implementation.

2.1.1.2. Encapsulation¶

Consider the following example:

/** A class with no encapsulation */
class BadBoyShipping {
  public int weight;
  public String address;

  /* remaining code ommitted ... */
}

class ExploitShipping {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    BadBoyShipping bad = new BadBoyShipping();
    bad.weight = -3;  // Nothing prevents me from doing this
  }
}

It’s clearly a bad idea to allow people to set the shipping weight to a negative value. How can you change this class to prevent problems like this from happening? Your only choice is to make the weight private and write a method that allows the class to set limits on weight. But since you have already declared weight to be public, as soon as you make this ‘fix’, you break every class that currently uses it, including those that are behaving properly!

The ability to change your code without breaking every class that uses it is one of the key benefits of encapsulation. By limiting access and hiding the implementation details of your class to the maximum extent possible, you make it possible to change, fix, extend, or rework your class without requiring changes in any of the code that uses your class.

How do we ensure our code remains flexible and maintainable?

• Keep fields hidden using a private access modifier

• Make public accessor methods and force callers to use them by hiding your fields.

Compare our first example with the following:

/** A class with encapsulation */
class Shipping {
  private int weight;

  public int getWeight () {
    return weight;
  }

  public void setWeight (int value) {
    weight = value;
  }

}

class ExploitShipping {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    Shipping s = new Shipping();
    s.setWeight(-3);   // Still not the behavior we are looking for
  }
}

You might be thinking “Hey! How is this any better than the first example?” We added methods to set and get the weight, but added no new capability. What have we gained?

We have gained quite a bit. Now we are free to change our minds about how weight values are set and retrieved. Even though we aren’t doing anything now, we are free to change the implementation later and no calling class will know.

Good OO design demands thinking about the future. Which brings us to our final example. No classes would need to be modified to add the new capability below.

/** A class with encapsulation */
class Shipping {
  // minimum shipping weight in oz.
  private static final int MIN_WEIGHT = 1;
  private int weight;

  public int getWeight () {
    return weight;
  }

  public void setWeight (int value) {
    weight = Math.max(MIN_WEIGHT, value);
  }

}

class ExploitShipping {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    Shipping s = new Shipping();
    s.setWeight(-3);   // weight is set to MIN_WEIGHT
  }
}

2.1.1.3. Inheritance¶

Consider the following example:

class Test {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    Test test1 = new Test();
    Test test2 = new Test();

    if (!test1.equals(test2)) {
      System.out.println("'test1' does not equal 'test2'.");
    }
    if (test1 instanceof Object) {
      System.out.println("'test1' is an Object.");
    }
  }
}

When run, produces the following output:

'test1' does not equal 'test2'.
'test1' is an Object.

Where did the equals method come from? It was inherited from the class Object. In Java (and some other languages as well), every class is a subclass of the class Object. In Java, every class inherits methods for equals, hashCode, toString, and a few others.

Why?

The creators of the language assumed it would be very common to be able to determine if two objects were equal or to produce a String representation of an object. If these methods were not in the Object class, then every programmer would have to create their own solution for this problem. More importantly, every programmer might implement a different interface for basic needs currently satisfied by ‘equals’ and ‘toString’, which would complicate the implementation of these common functions between developers.

More generically, inheritance promotes code reuse. An excellent example is the InputStream class. The InputStream class is the base class (superclass) of all input streams in the Java IO API. InputStream subclasses include the FileInputStream, BufferedInputStream and the PushbackInputStream among others.

Java InputStream’s are used for reading data, one byte at a time, for example:

try( InputStream inputstream = new FileInputStream("file.txt") ) {

  int data = inputstream.read();
  while(data != -1) {
    System.out.print((char) data);
    data = inputstream.read();
  }
} catch (Exception e) { }

Which creates a new FileInputStream instance. FileInputStream is a subclass of InputStream so it is safe to assign an instance of FileInputStream to an InputStream variable.

The InputStream class exposes common methods which all subclasses of InputStream inherit.

int available():

Returns an estimate of the number of bytes that can be read (or skipped over) from this input stream without blocking by the next invocation of a method for this input stream.

void close():

Closes this input stream and releases any system resources associated with the stream.

void mark(int readlimit):

Marks the current position in this input stream.

boolean markSupported():

Tests if this input stream supports the mark and reset methods.

abstract int read():

Reads the next byte of data from the input stream.

int read(byte[] b):

Reads some number of bytes from the input stream and stores them into the buffer array b.

int read(byte[] b, int off, int len):

Reads up to len bytes of data from the input stream into an array of bytes.

void reset():

Repositions this stream to the position at the time the mark method was last called on this input stream.

long skip(long n):

Skips over and discards n bytes of data from this input stream.

The FileInputStream class inherits all of the methods from InputStream and offers two more:

FileChannel getChannel():

Returns the unique FileChannel object associated with this file input stream.

FileDescriptor getFD():

Returns the FileDescriptor object that represents the connection to the actual file in the file system being used by this FileInputStream.

In contrast, the AudioInputStream class offers two completely different methods:

AudioFormat getFormat():

Obtains the audio format of the sound data in this audio input stream.

long getFrameLength():

Obtains the length of the stream, expressed in sample frames rather than bytes.

The above examples illustrate that both the AudioInputStream and FileInputStream objects have an IS-A relationship with InputStream. That is, an AudioInputStream IS-A InputStream and a FileInputStream IS-A InputStream.

The IS-A relationship in Java is expressed using the keywords extends for class inheritance and implements for interface implementations.

This is different from extending classes through composition.

Not only does inheritance promote code reuse, but it provides a means to use polymorphism in our code.

2.1.1.4. Polymorphism¶

Polymorphism is often referred to as the third pillar of object-oriented programming, after encapsulation and inheritance. Polymorphism is a Greek word that means “many-shaped” and polymorphism itself comes in two distinct forms:

• Run-time polymorphism

  Base classes may define and implement abstract, or virtual methods, and derived classes can override them, which means they provide their own definition and implementation. At run-time, when client code calls the method, the type is resolved and invokes that override of the virtual method. Thus in your source code you can call a method on a base class, and cause a derived class’s version of the method to be executed.

  At run time, objects of a derived class may be treated as objects of a base class in places such as method parameters and collections or arrays. When this occurs, the object’s declared type is no longer identical to its run-time type.

  Note that a derived class may be treated as any type in its inheritance hierarchy. Also, it is perfectly valid for an overloaded method to be overridden.

• Compile-time polymorphism

  Compile-time polymorphism is simply method overloading. Overloaded methods have the same method name but different number of arguments or different types of arguments or both.

2.1.1.5. Run-time Polymorphism¶

Consider our earlier discussion of the class Object when we discussed encapsulation. What is the result of the following code from [Bloch] pg. 74?

public class Complex {
  private final double real;  // real number
  private final double imag;  // imaginary number's coefficient

  public Complex(double real, double imag) {
    this.real = real;
    this.imag = imag;
  }

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    Complex a = new Complex(1, 0);
    Complex b = new Complex(1, 0);

    if (a.equals(b)) {
      System.out.println ("'a' equals 'b'.");
    } else {
      System.out.println ("'a' and 'b' are not equal.");
    }
    System.out.println("'a' is " + a.toString());
    System.out.println("'b' is " + b.toString());
  }
}

In this case, the two objects are not considered equal because they are not the same object. This is the default behavior for equals(), and it is often sufficient. In cases where you need to determine whether two objects are logically equivalent, you override the equals() method.

There are many classes where it would be irritating to have equals() evaluate to false:

Recall that == always compares object references, so here a == b always evaluates to false while a.equals(b) evaluates to true.

Similarly, the output of toString() displays the location of the object on the heap, which is not always the most intuitive string representation of your objects.

Compare the previous example with the following. What output does this program produce?

public class Complex {
  private final double real;  // real number
  private final double imag;  // imaginary number's coefficient

  public Complex(double real, double imag) {
    this.real = real;
    this.imag = imag;
  }

  @Override 
  public boolean equals(Object o) {
    if (o == this) {
      return true;
    }
    if (!(o instanceof Complex)) {
      return false;
    }
    Complex c = (Complex) o;

    return Double.compare(real, c.real) == 0 &&
           Double.compare(imag, c.imag) == 0;
  }

  @Override public String toString() {
    String sign = imag < 0 ? " - " : " + ";
    return "(" + real + sign + Math.abs(imag) + "i)";
  }

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    Complex a = Complex(1, 0);
    Complex b = Complex(1, 0);

    if (a.equals(b)) {
      System.out.println ("'a' equals 'b'.");
    } else {
      System.out.println ("'a' and 'b' are not equal.");
    }
    System.out.println ("'a' = " + a);
    System.out.println ("'b' = " + b);
  }
}

The class overrides the definitions of equals() and toString() providing a more generally useful implementation than provided by the default implementation in the Object class.

The output is:

2.1.1.6. Compile-time Polymorphism¶

In procedural languages without overloading, it was common to have many functions with similar names to perform essentially the same task on different data types. The absolute value function is a classic example.

In C, the abs() function returns the absolute value of an integer. The only valid parameter you can pass is an int—any other type will fail to compile. How is this problem solved in C? With different method names: labs() is used to return the absolute value of a long and fabs() returns the absolute value of a float. The burden is on the users of these functions—programmers to remember which function is needed. Additionally, there is no easy way to be flexible about the generic concept of taking the absolute value of a number. The burden is on the programmer of the various *abs() functions to ensure the correct function is used with the appropriate type.

Overloading is a powerful tool, but there are pitfalls. Consider the following snippet. What does the following program print?

public class DataStructureGroup {

  public static String group (List<?> l) {
    return "List";
  }

  public static String group (Queue<?> l) {
    return "Queue";
  }

  public static String group (Collection<?> l) {
    return "Unknown group";
  }

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    Collection <?>[] cols = {
      new ArrayList<Integer>(),
      new PriorityQueue<String>(),
      new TreeSet<Long>()
    };

    for (Collection<?> c : cols) {
      System.out.println (group(c));
    }
  }
}

You might expect the program to print:

It does not. Why?

Because group is overloaded and the compiler determines which function to invoke. For all three types the compile-time type of the parameter passed to group is the same: Collection<?>. The type changes at run-time, but this has no effect on overloading.

Keep in mind that overriding methods is far more common in Java than overloading, so consider your use of overloading carefully.

2.1.1.7. Abstraction¶

One of the key advantages of object oriented languages over procedural languages is that objects act as metaphors for the real-world—in other words, objects model the real world. In a procedural language, tasks are executed in functions or procedures and the data that the functions operate on is stored elsewhere. A better way to manage the complexity of large programs is to keep the data in a program and the operations allowed on that data in a cohesive logical unit. A program describing a car might perform basic tasks: steer, speed up, slow down, but also needs to store information about the car: current speed, direction, cruise control setting, etc.

If you wrote your car driving program in a procedural language, you would likely require different functions to control each of the car behaviors. You might create functions for turnCarOn(), turnCarOff(), accelerate(), steer(), and others. You would also need variables to store the current state of the car. Although it’s perfectly valid to construct such a car in a procedural language, these functions and variables we have created only exist as a whole entity, a car in the mind of the programmer who created it. The idea that individual units within a program each have a specific role or responsibility is called cohesion and is difficult to achieve in procedural programs.

For very large programs, which might contain hundreds or even thousands of entities, lack of cohesion can introduce errors, make programs more difficult to understand and maintain, and complicate the development of very large programs.