principles for writing maintainable code

Tight coupling means a group of classes are highly dependent on one another which you should avoid in your code. If you’re looking for a practical example, go back to the part in this article where we discuss how to rescue our code from having to depend exclusively on the MilkyWay PDF class. It helps you avoid traps that can unnecessarily complicate the code base. Prefer single words for methods, interfaces, and packages. Maybe they can share the setContent() method, but even there, the process of acquiring content could be different for each PDF service class, so typing everything up in an Inheritance hierarchy will make things worse. Yes, I too wasn’t amused when I first came across it, but over time I’ve come to understand — and admire — what this rule is trying to say: code once is written shouldn’t need to be changed. Does that mean it’s all the fault of the Repository pattern? How to Optimize PHP Laravel Web Application for High Performance? If what you've written in the past doesn't suit your needs today, it can be expensive to change. If you’ve worked as a professional developer for more than three days, you know our jobs are anything but creative and exciting. When writing code, there are many specific principles that aim to make your code more maintainable: DRY, the single responsibility principle, the Law of Demeter, the open/closed principle, etc.These are great principles to follow, but it can be difficult to keep all of them in your head at once. . Copy all the code from this function, make a few changes, and call it a day? If SMS confirmation needs to be set after user registration, the UserService will take care of it (by calling some other class that knows how to send SMS), and again the controllers are left untouched. I’ve decided to include a list of some valuable resources which can help you become better at both writing maintainable code and maintaining existing code that you didn’t write. We no have ten files to edit, and we must make sure that the logic is handled exactly the same in all of them. Yeah, I know, it’s another of those OOPSisms that make no sense the first time. You’ll notice that this method does a good job of following the Single Responsibility Principle: it doesn’t attempt to walk through the HTML content passed to it and create a PDF (in fact, it doesn’t even know it’s been given HTML); instead, it passes on that responsibility to the specialized MilkyWay class, and presents whatever it gets, as a download. The problem is that the interface we created — or should I say the interface that popularized in practically every tutorial — is too broad. If you used a PDF-generation service and your code was littered with new ABCService() class, the day the business decided to use some other service would be the day remembered forever — for all the wrong reasons! . What about a client who has a legacy system running on the XML format? And after all that song and dance, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the point where it all falls into place and the Open-Closed Principle is revealed at work! This thing sounds like something straight out of an Organic Chemistry textbook. Code is read more than it’s written. Although there are dozens of useful rules and principles in writing clean code, I think most can be reduced to one of these three: Optimise for the reader of the code, not the writer. The code you write should have the following qualities. The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is one of the five so-called SOLID principles, developed and promoted by Robert C. Martin to help developers produce flexible and maintainable code. That’s because the difference is only in names, and both the interface as well as the class have the same methods working in the same way, so our code will work as before. Consider How to Test a solution before writing it, or at least while writing. In fact, a Repository is a well known and accepted pattern that brings consistency, flexibility, and abstraction to your data access patterns. I was like, “What??! Yes, makes sense. . The business requirement changed, some new code was added (a wrapper class) and only one line of code was changed — everything else remains untouched and the entire team can go home with confidence and sleep peacefully. Unlike other resources found on the web that provide examples that you do understand but then leave you wondering how they’d help you in real-world cases, let’s dive into something specific, a coding style we see over and over, and perhaps even write in our Laravel applications. Perhaps you’ve heard of the term “SOLID principles” before, perhaps not. Guess what, that’s it! What do you do? Here in CustomGears we decided to gather most important best practices with Ruby on Rails, examples and definations in one place. Write code that can be easily tested. In addition, reusable code helps performance by making it possible to In extreme cases, developers have no other choice, but to completely rewrite the CSS of an application. The Law of Demeter, or Principle of Least Knowledge is a well-known software design principle for reducing coupling between collaborating objects. This is indeed what many developers are doing, but they’re setting themselves up for failure. So, why does all this song and dance about “Single Responsibility” matter at all? Different people explain this differently, but for me, this principle is all about bringing discipline and focus into your code. And it’s easy to see what it does: register new users. The point is, we shouldn’t create our interfaces blindly. . If you optimise for the... Don’t repeat yourself (often abbreviated to DRY). The example we finished just before this section is a great illustration: if I replace the generic IPDFGenerator type in the method argument with the specific MilkyWayPDFGenerator instance, would you expect the code to break or keep on working? And God knows what else will come the next day. ?” and constantly worry about it at the back of their head). Kinsta leverages Google's low latency network infrastructure to deliver content faster. There’s no perfect answer, and so a developer must keep going higher and higher, gathering as many tools as he can and try to do his best. However, in simpler terms, it boils down to this: Each class in your codebase should have a very specific role; that is, it should be responsible for nothing more than a single goal. Let’s see an example before I explain my interpretation. Just as bad design triggers more bad design, good design can trigger more good design. A global CDN and cloud-based web application firewall for your website to supercharge the performance and secure from online threats. umm, separating . Let’s look at a very common and practical example. Although testing every possible scenario can be time-consuming, you should definitely implement automated unit testing because it allows you to see what needs to be fixed when you make changes. If you found this article useful, please leave a comment. And you’d be right, in the sense that this principle is more or less a repetition of what we’ve discussed till now. Then, I learned the SOLID principles. T ransparent The consequences of change should be obvious in the code that is changing and in distant code that relies upon it; Now, if the service we want to use (MilkyWay, in our case) doesn’t follow this interface, it’s our job to write a class that does that. Those principles of OOP consist of: Second one is LoD, or The Law of Demeter: The code you write should have the following qualities. To a developer, maintainable code simply means “code that is easy to modify or extend”. And why is that bad? Change? In our case creating a base class for all PDF classes will not be a great idea because it’s hard to imagine different types of PDF engines/services sharing the same behavior. For now, just think of it as something that can create new class instances for us. These guiding principles are represented by the acronym SOLID. We might end up writing a controller method like this: I left out request validation, etc., in order to focus on the core issue. The principles I've identified have not really been hidden; since they've beenwidely documented for years, and they're actually things that most gooddevelopers do as a matter of course. This “something” that I mentioned takes the form of the Service Container in the Laravel world. Our controller method is too dependent on the MilkyWay class. The principles of functional programming, or FP, can significantly aid in these goals. Instead, we should create several smaller, specialized interfaces, letting classes implement those that are needed, and leaving out those that are not. The solution is simple, and is also the name of the principle we’re discussing: Interface Segregation. . You can only avoid giving your future self a checkmate by making architecturally solid … Instead of having one change affect all relevant modules, you have to find all duplicate modules and repeat that change. 2. Now, what tools do we have in PHP for creating new types? Refuse to use Ada. This base interface might look something like this: And now, for your User model, you’re supposed to create a UserRepository that implements this interface; then, for your Customer model, you’re supposed to create a CustomerRepository that implements this interface; you get the idea. This method is now closed for modification and change-resistant. In our work we’re using principles like: DRY (Don’t repeat youself), KISS (Keep it simple, stupid), YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) and Eating your own dog food, but in this post we’ll highlight most important ones. Code that is consistently formattedis easier to read and, consequently, maintain. As long as you write software for a living, remember that it’s the ideal everyone is striving for. At the heart of maintainability is carefully constructed code that is easy to read; code that is easy to dissect in order to locate the particular component relating to a given change request; code that is then easy to modify without the risk of starting a chain reaction of breakages in dependant modules. So, why are the codebases so complex that we feel like gutting ourselves? For regular repositories, I’d then say class UserRepository implements IReadOnlyRepository, IWriteModifyRepository { . And by future-proof, I mean that it’s not ready to handle change without creating a mess. This is being created and passed to us by the Service Container, as e discussed earlier. More than once I have found myself struggling with my code to fix one tiny bug or extend some feature. Comments can serve to be invaluble for new developers coming into a project - needing to understand what's occurring in the code. SOLID: The SOLID principle stands for five principles which are Single responsibility, Open-closed, … All we now need to do is write a new IPDFGenerator wrapper class for SilkyWay and change the binding in our Service Container code: Nothing else needs to change, because our application is written according to an interface (the IPDFGenerator interface) instead of a concrete class. Stripped of highfalutin jargon and distilled down to its most basic form, the principle of Interface Segregation has this to say: The more numerous, more specialized interfaces there are in your application, the more modular and less weird your code will be. One part of the reason is the company leadership (read: folks who never get it), while the other part is the complexity of the code we have to work with. In fact, it might just be the easiest principle of the five to understand (well, err . Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) The SOLID principle helps in reducing tight coupling. Just five simple principles — long-established and well known — if followed with discipline, will make sure your code is readable, to others and to you when you look at it six months later. And if we wish to use some other service someday, we’ll have to literally do a global search in our code editor and change all the code snippets that mention MilkyWay. Instead of rewriting software components from scratch, a programmer can make use of an exist-ing component. I know, I know, it was quite a long and hard read, and I want to apologize for that. Want to sleep peacefully? In software development, Object-Oriented Design plays a crucial role when it comes to writing flexible, scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. Why? If you look at different sources describing the Single Responsibility Principle, you’ll get some variation in its definition. The first step in creating code that is TRUE is to ensure that each class has a single, well-defined responsibility. And that’s the spirit we need to maintain if we want to truly learn things. I must say that whoever came up with the definitions of these principles certainly wasn’t thinking of less experienced developers. It’s time for something serious: if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering, “Okay, all good. Using these principles helps me write smaller pieces of… The end result: a soupy mess that very few want to touch and nobody understands. A few days go by, and now your client/employer is getting a mobile app developed, which means this route will be of no use for users registering from mobile devices. But, most importantly, there’s no trace of the MilkyWay class. Let’s also suppose we have the paid subscription of a hypothetical service called MilkyWay, which will do the actual PDF generation. Now, it so happened in one of my projects that some of the models were not supposed to be writable by anyone but the system. Well, in simpler terms, that’s all this principle is saying: make sure your subclasses implement all the methods exactly as required, with the same number and type of arguments, and the same return type. You … And here, I’m afraid, nobody has a clear answer. into a PDF file and also force an immediate download in the browser. 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The definitions of these techniques ca n't be used in Ada PDF file and also force an immediate in. Firewall for your website to supercharge the performance and secure from online threats that we feel like ourselves...

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