Rafael Naufal's blog

Communicating my thoughts on software development

Posts Tagged code

Jcombiner: Combinations of collections for Java

Nov 27

Posted by rnaufal in code, collections, collectors, combinations, development, functional, gradle, java, java11, jcombiner, jdk11, junit, junit5, lambdas, mockito, programming, streams | No Comments

JCombiner is a framework to generate combinations of collections for Java. I have written it in Java 11 using Java 9 modules (JPMS) and Gradle as build tool. JUnit 5 and Mockito are used for unit testing and Jacoco for code coverage. Streams and the Collectors API are extensively used throughout the development of JCombiner project.

Jcombiner’s source code is available under GitHub.

Code examples of its usage can be found on GitHub here. More examples can be found on this module inside JCombiner.

Share your comments about this framework here! Please feel free to contribute to it, more features are welcome!

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Refactoring large conditional method using method references

Sep 10

Posted by rnaufal in code, development, functional, interface, java, java8, jdk8, lambdas, optional, polymorphism, programming, streams | No Comments

Some years ago I wrote junit-parameters, which is basically a custom JUnit test runner that make it possible to add parameters to JUnit 4 test methods.

Browsing its source code SonarLint pointed me a large conditional if/else method from the ParameterTypeConverterFactory class:

This method converts the method parameter to its specific type based on its Class object. As it is few lines long, it showed me a good opportunity to refactor this code a little bit with a more elegant solution. This project has unit tests, so I could start refactoring it in small steps and start over again whether I have made a mistake.

I started by defining a functional interface called ParameterConverter:

and I created an immutable map which maps each Class object to its associated ParameterConverter instance (making use of method references):

Then I refactored the original conditional method to get the ParameterConverter instance from the convertersByClass map and mapping to an Optional instance in case it didn’t exist.

After those refactorings, SonarLint stopped warning me. Below is the modified version of the original method with some helper methods:

The complete code can be found at my GitHub here.

This was the first change of breaking this complicated conditional method into a more readable one. It was safe to do so because after each change I could run my unit tests suite to assert I haven’t broken anything. The next refactoring could be towards a more object-oriented approach like Replace Conditional with Polymorphism.

What did you think about this refactoring? Have you ever had such a situation? Drop your comments here!

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3 Things Every Java Developer Should Stop Doing

Feb 19

Posted by rnaufal in code, development, functional, java, jdk8, programming | No Comments

My friends Andre and Leonnardo have sent me an interesting article about some bad habits every Java developer should stop doing in their code.

Basically the author picked up the following points and discussed each one of them, showing code examples why they aren’t good practices at all:

  1. Returning Null
  2. Defaulting to Functional Programming
  3. Creating Indiscriminate Getters and Setters

I agree with all these points as being bad practices in Java code. How about you? What do you think about it?

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35 programming habits that make your code smell

Aug 20

Posted by rnaufal in code, development, programming, teamwork, testing | No Comments

Interesting article about some bad programming practices, including topics like code organization, teamwork, testing and maintenance.

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K Palindromes puzzle

Sep 3

Posted by rnaufal in code, languages, palindrome, programming, puzzle, ruby, string | No Comments

Here we have the K Palindromes puzzle from Javalobby:

You probably already know what a palindrome is: a string to results in the same word, whether read left to right, or right to left. A K Palindrome is when a string can be tranformed into a palindrome by changing K characters at most. Regular palindromes have K=0.

Your challenge today is to write a method which takes a string and a value for k and returns true if it the string qualifies as a K palindrome.

Below is the code in Ruby. Our input string is omississimo and it’s a 0 palindrome String.

def isKPalindrome(s, k)
	chars = s.chars.to_a
	limit = chars.size - 1
	count = chars[0...chars.size / 2].each_index.count {|i| !chars[i].eql?(chars[limit - i])}
	k == count ? true : false
end

puts(isKPalindrome("omississimo", 0)) #true

The output is true. Do you have another solution? Drop your comments here!

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Minimum difference puzzle in Ruby

Aug 28

Posted by rnaufal in arrays, code, languages, programming, puzzle, ruby | No Comments

Folks, here we are for another puzzle from Javalobby:

Given two arrays, sorted and exactly the same length, write a function that finds a pair of numbers – one from each of the arrays – such that the difference between both is as small as possible.

Suppose our input arrays are [1,2,3,4,5] and [6,7,8,9,10]. Below is my solution in Ruby, it’s a one liner code :-):

[1,2,3,4,5].product([6,7,8,9,10]).map {|x, y| [x, y, (x-y).abs]}.sort { |a, b| a.last<=> b.last }.first.take(2)

The output is [5, 6].

Have another solution? Leave your comments here!

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Balancing arrays puzzle in Ruby

Aug 23

Posted by rnaufal in arrays, code, languages, programming, puzzle, ruby | No Comments

Here we are for another puzzle from Javalobby:

Given an array of numbers, return the index at which the array can be balanced by all numbers on the left side add up the the sum of all numbers of the right side.

For example, an array with [1,5,6,7,9,10] can be balanced by splitting the array at position 4

Here is the solution in Ruby:

v=[1,5,6,7,9,10];sum = v.reduce(:+);count=0;index = (0...v.size).detect { |i| count += v[i]; count * 2 == sum};index == nil ? nil : index + 1

The input array [1,5,6,7,9,10] will split the array at position 4, as stated above.

Any other solutions? Drop comments here 🙂

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Finding the second highest frequency

Aug 11

Posted by rnaufal in code, languages, programming, puzzle, ruby | No Comments

It’s been a long time since I posted for the last time, but I promise I’ll try to keep this blog up-to-date 🙂

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore new technologies and recently I’ve been studying Ruby solving some puzzles posted by on JavaLobby.

The problem is about finding the second highest frequency of a character in a String. Below is the Ruby code, using the powerful concept of Ruby closures.

v="aabbbc".chars;h=Hash[v.map{|k| [k, v.count(k)] }];max=h.values.max;found=h.select { |k, v| v < max};found.keys.first if found

For the input String "aabbbc", the result is "a". I could done it in a more OOP style, but I chose a more concise solution :-)

If you have another version in Ruby, feel free to post a comment!

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The power of pair programming

Jan 14

Posted by rnaufal in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Some weeks ago I started doing pair programming with some co-workers basically for two things:

  1. code some tasks of an user story
  2. get familiar with a new software code base

I haven’t had an opportunity to put this technique in practice a lot before, but I can say it was extremely important and benefit for the project. Sometimes I was the driver and sometimes I was the observer. The driver is the person who starts coding and the observer is who starts doing the code review. That point is important: code review.

Pair programming encourages the review of the code. Perhaps you won’t have an opportunity to refactor some code as you have when you are pairing with someone. I think code reviews are important because:

  • Reviews increase code quality, because there are 2 people thinking at the same task at the same time.
  • Refactoring areas arise in the design where improvements are needed
  • When you have the strong support of an IDE (as Eclipse), some refactorings (extract method, extract class, introduce parameter) are highly automated
  • Code is more read than written, two people reading the code can understand a lot more about the code base
  • New ideas arise because of different point of views
  • Questions can be solved by the sum of knowledge of the code base

And you? What’s your experience with pair programming?

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Effect propagation to code

Oct 27

Posted by rnaufal in Uncategorized | No Comments

Reading Michael Feathers’ ‘Working Effectively With LegacyCode’, I found quite interesting his heuristics to trace propagation of effects to code:

  1. Identify a method that will change.
  2. If the method has a return value, look at its callers.
  3. See if the method modifies any values. If it does, look at the method that use those values, and the methods that use those methods.
  4. Make sure you look for superclasses and subclasses that might be users of these instance variables and methods also.
  5. Look at parameters to the methods. See if they or any objects that their methods return are used by the code that you want to change.
  6. Look for global variables and static data that is modified in any of the methods you’ve identified.

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