What is this "Execute Around" idiom (or similar) I've been hearing about? Why might I use it, and why might I not want to use it?
Basically it's the pattern where you write a method to do things which are always required, e.g. resource allocation and clean-up, and make the caller pass in "what we want to do with the resource". For example:
public interface InputStreamAction
{
void useStream(InputStream stream) throws IOException;
}
// Somewhere else
public void executeWithFile(String filename, InputStreamAction action)
throws IOException
{
InputStream stream = new FileInputStream(filename);
try {
action.useStream(stream);
} finally {
stream.close();
}
}
// Calling it
executeWithFile("filename.txt", new InputStreamAction()
{
public void useStream(InputStream stream) throws IOException
{
// Code to use the stream goes here
}
});
// Calling it with Java 8 Lambda Expression:
executeWithFile("filename.txt", s -> System.out.println(s.read()));
// Or with Java 8 Method reference:
executeWithFile("filename.txt", ClassName::methodName);
The calling code doesn't need to worry about the open/clean-up side - it will be taken care of by executeWithFile
.
This was frankly painful in Java because closures were so wordy, starting with Java 8 lambda expressions can be implemented like in many other languages (e.g. C# lambda expressions, or Groovy), and this special case is handled since Java 7 with try-with-resources
and AutoClosable
streams.
Although "allocate and clean-up" is the typical example given, there are plenty of other possible examples - transaction handling, logging, executing some code with more privileges etc. It's basically a bit like the template method pattern but without inheritance.