Previously we used the facade pattern in order to interact with a legacy application. Our next pattern would be the proxy pattern.
The proxy pattern is used when we want
- Control the access to an object
- Add extra functionality when accessing an object.
One of the most common usages is when we want to monitor specific actions and add some metrics.
For example we have a data upload service.
package com.gkatzioura.design.structural.proxy;
public interface DataUploadService {
void upload(String payload);
}And its http implementation
package com.gkatzioura.design.structural.proxy;
public class HttpDataUploadImpl implements DataUploadService {
@Override
public void upload(String payload) {
}
}We need to have some measures on the average time it takes to send our application’s payload, in order to decide wether our implementation is good enough. If not we might need to consider something more performant.
Instead of messing with our implementation and adding code that has nothing to do with the actual transmission of the payload we shall create a proxy of our implementation.
package com.gkatzioura.design.structural.proxy;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.time.Duration;
import java.time.Instant;
public class HttpDataUploadProxy implements DataUploadService {
private final HttpDataUploadImpl httpDataUpload;
public HttpDataUploadProxy(HttpDataUploadImpl httpDataUpload) {
this.httpDataUpload = httpDataUpload;
}
@Override
public void upload(String payload) {
Instant start = Instant.now();
httpDataUpload.upload(payload);
Duration duration = Duration.between(start,Instant.now());
int byteSize = payload.getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset()).length;
/**
* Log properly to splunk, cloudwatch etc
*/
}
}As you can see our implementation hasn’t changed and we do manage to send the metrics needed to the analytics service of your choice.
We can also apply the same pattern in case this service has some quota and thus we want to control it because it might lead us to be over budget.
package com.gkatzioura.design.structural.proxy;
public class HttpDataUploadQuotaProxy implements DataUploadService {
private final HttpDataUploadImpl httpDataUpload;
public HttpDataUploadQuotaProxy(HttpDataUploadImpl httpDataUpload) {
this.httpDataUpload = httpDataUpload;
}
@Override
public void upload(String payload) {
if(quotaExceeded()) {
throw new IllegalStateException("Quota exceeded cannot upload payload");
}
httpDataUpload.upload(payload);
}
private boolean quotaExceeded() {
/**
* Code that should check whether we exceeded our quota or not
*/
return false;
}
}Summing up we just used the proxy pattern in order to control the access to our object and also to enhance its functionality.
You can also find the source code on github.
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Emmanouil Gkatziouras, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Structural Design Patterns: Proxy Pattern Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
