This is an assignment to the Software Architecture class at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg.
This assignment covers the two design patterns Adapter and Flyweight.
Implementing the flyweight pattern will improve the performance. Using an adapter, we will use an easier to handle API to load images.
The given app generates two random fleets of Star Wars fighters (one for the light side and one for the dark side of the force -- obviously).
The application displays the two fleets in two TableView<>s containing the following information:
- an image of the fighter type
- the name of the pilot
Up to now, every JavaFX application we implemented used to display the data with a ListView<> that actually just calls the toString() of the objects passed to it.
The usage of a TableView<> is a little bit more complicated and requires the implementation of CellValueFactory (factory pattern!) to massage an object instance into the TableView<>.
The implementation is located in the ohm.softa.a09.internals.displaying package.
The app is fully functional, but inefficiently implemented. Go ahead, try it out!
If you click the Start button, a background thread will be started that creates Fighter instances as long as you don't stop the thread by click the button again.
To keep the load of the UI thread as low as possible, the background thread always creates a certain amount of Fighter instances before pushing them to the UI in batches whenever the configured threshold (defaults to 10) is reached.
The area chart at the bottom of the window shows the amount of memory (in megabytes) allocated by the application updated every second by another background thread.
The background thread instantiated by the Start/Stop button handler is using a FighterFactory instance to create new fighters.
If you have a closer look at the implementation, you will notice that there's an implemenation flaw that results in a huge amount of allocated memory the more Fighter instances you create.
Thats where the Flyweight pattern comes into play:
- Think about what are the intrinsic and what are the extrinsic parts of the
Fighterclass. (In case you don't remember the terms or the concept have a look here.) - Refactor the class
FighterFactoryto follow the Flyweight pattern by caching the intrinsic parts. - Modify the process of creation to benefit of your caching mechanism.
Hint: think of a data structure that enables you to retrieve the matching element with a single call?.
If everything works out the memory usage should stagnate instead of constantly grow when you start the application.
As you already know adapters are used for example to create a compatibility layer between otherwise incompatible interfaces or to create a more convenient API if the API of a library appears too complicated.
You might have noticed that the API to load an image in the FighterFactory is a little bit more complicated and verbose than probably required.
As a good software engineer you should implement a FxImageLoaderAdapter that encapsulates the generic ResourceLoader<T> and that has a more convenient API shown in the following UML.
Hint: the arrow between the two classes only illustrates a composition of the FxImageLoaderAdapter and the ResourceLoader<T>.