Statically fetching dependencies

I’ve worked with several code bases that were littered with calls to Zend_Registry::get(), sfContext::getInstance(), etc. to fetch a dependency when needed. I’m a little afraid to mention façades here, but they also belong in this list. The point of this article is not to bash a certain framework (they are all lovely), but to show how to get rid of these “centralized dependency managers” when you need to. The characteristics of these things are:

I find it very curious that legacy (PHP) code often has the following characteristics:

1. Classes with the name of a central domain concept have grown too large.
2. Methods in these classes have become very generic.

Classes grow too large

I think the following happened:

The original developers tried to capture the domain logic in these classes. They implemented it based on what they knew at the time. Other developers, who worked on the code later, had to implement new features, or modify domain logic, because, well, things change. Also, because we need more things.

This article continues where Unary call sites and intention-revealing interfaces ended.

While reading David West’s excellent book “Object Thinking”, I stumbled across an interesting quote from David Parnas on the programming method that most of us use by default:

The easiest way to describe the programming method used in most projects today was given to me by a teacher who was explaining how he teaches programming. “Think like a computer,” he said. He instructed his students to begin by thinking about what the computer had to do first and to write that down. They would then think about what the computer had to do next and continue in that way until they had described the last thing the computer would do… […]

Call sites

One of the features I love most about my IDE is the button “Find Usages”. It is invaluable when improving a legacy code base. When used on a class it will show you where this class is used (as a parameter type, in an import statement, etc.). When used on a method, it will show you where this method gets called. Users of a method are often called “clients”, but when we use “Find Usages”, we might as well use the more generic term “call sites”.

Setting the stage: Code complexity

Code complexity often gets measured by calculating the Cyclomatic Complexity per unit of code. The number can be calculated by taking all the branches of the code into consideration.

Code complexity is an indicator for several things:

• How hard it is to understand a piece of code; a high number indicates many branches in the code. When reading the code, a programmer has to keep track of all those branches, in order to understand all the different ways in which the code can work.
• How hard it is to test that piece of code; a high number indicates many branches in the code, and in order to fully test the piece of code, all those branches need to be covered separately.

In both cases, high code complexity is a really bad thing. So, in general, we always strive for low code complexity. Unfortunately, many projects that you’ll inherit (“legacy projects”), will contain code that has high code complexity, and no tests. A common hypothesis is that a high code complexity arises from a lack of tests. At the same time, it’s really hard to write tests for code with high complexity, so this is a situation that is really hard to get out.