JSF and Observer design pattern - part I (plain code)

Observer is a Behavioral Design Pattern with the following object structural:

The GoF (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides) book describes this pattern as “A one‐to‐many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified and updated automatically.”

Basically, the observer pattern is based on a subject and some observers:

subject - an object that changes its state

observers - objects notified when the subject has changed its state

Between subject and observers there is a one-to-many relationship, which practically means that a subject has one or many observers.

Observer pattern is also called as publish-subscribe pattern. Some of it’s implementations are:

• java.util.EventListener in Swing
• javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionBindingListener
• javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionAttributeListener

In plain code the observer pattern can be easily achieved via the Java implementation of the observer pattern. The observers should implement the java.util.Observer interface and the subject should extend the java.util.Observable class, as in the below example.

In our plain code example, the subject is a main fire station, and the observers are local fire stations. Each time a new fire is reported to the main fire station the local fire stations should be immediately informed. So, the subject implementation should provide at least the following three methods:

·         a method for registering new observers (e.g. registerLocalFireStation())

·         a method for reporting fires (e.g. fireStarted())

·         a method for notifying local fire stations about the reported fires (e.g. notifyLocalFireStations())

The local fire stations are stored in a List<Observer>:

import java.util.ArrayList;

import java.util.List;

import java.util.Observable;

import java.util.Observer;

public class MainFireStation extends Observable {

 private final List<Observer> localFireStations = new ArrayList<>();

 public void fireStarted(String address) {

  notifyLocalFireStations(address);

 }

 public void notifyLocalFireStations(String address) {

  for (Observer o : this.localFireStations) {

       o.update(this, address);

  }

 }

 public void registerLocalFireStation(Observer o) {

  localFireStations.add(o);

 }

}

Now, we can write the observers. Below you can see three local fire stations that want to be notified when a new fire is reported to the main fire station:

import java.util.Observable;

import java.util.Observer;

public class ViningsFireStation implements Observer {

 @Override

 public void update(Observable o, Object arg) {

  System.out.println("Vinings fire department will go to " + arg);

 }

}

import java.util.Observable;

import java.util.Observer;

public class BrookhavenFireStation implements Observer {

 @Override

 public void update(Observable o, Object arg) {

  System.out.println("Brookhaven fire department will go to " + arg);

 }

}

import java.util.Observable;

import java.util.Observer;

public class DecaturFireStation implements Observer {

 @Override

 public void update(Observable o, Object arg) {

  System.out.println("Decatur fire department will go to " + arg);

 }

}

Done! Now, we can test this implementation. First, we instantiate the main fire station:

MainFireStation mainFireStation = new MainFireStation();

Next, we instantiate the local fire stations:

ViningsFireStation viningsFireStation = new ViningsFireStation();

DecaturFireStation decaturFireStation = new DecaturFireStation();

BrookhavenFireStation brookhavenFireStation = new BrookhavenFireStation();

Further, the observers registers to the subject:

mainFireStation.registerLocalFireStation(viningsFireStation);

mainFireStation.registerLocalFireStation(decaturFireStation);

mainFireStation.registerLocalFireStation(brookhavenFireStation);

Finally, we report several fires at main fire station:

mainFireStation.fireStarted("Home Park Atlanta, GA");

mainFireStation.fireStarted("High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309");

At this moment the observers will be notified. This can be seen via the below outputs provided by observers:

Vinings fire department will go to Home Park Atlanta, GA

Decatur fire department will go to Home Park Atlanta, GA

Brookhaven fire department will go to Home Park Atlanta, GA

Vinings fire department will go to High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309

Decatur fire department will go to High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309

Brookhaven fire department will go to High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309

In part two we discuss about the observer pattern in Java EE.