Reuse

Reuse is a major theme in software engineering practices. By reusing tried-and-tested components, the robustness of a new software system can be enhanced while reducing the manpower and time requirement. Reusable components come in many forms; it can be reusing a piece of code, a subsystem, or a whole software.

While you may be tempted to use many libraries/frameworks/platform that seem to crop up on a regular basis and promise to bring great benefits, note that there are costs associated with reuse. Here are some:

• The reused code may be an overkill (think using a sledgehammer to crack a nut) increasing the size of, or/and degrading the performance of, your software.
• The reused software may not be mature/stable enough to be used in an important product. That means the software can change drastically and rapidly, possibly in ways that break your software.
• Non-mature software has the risk of dying off as fast as they emerged, leaving you with a dependency that is no longer maintained.
• The license of the reused software (or its dependencies) restrict how you can use/develop your software.
• The reused software might have bugs, missing features, or security vulnerabilities that are important to your product but not so important to the maintainers of that software, which means those flaws will not get fixed as fast as you need them to.
• Malicious code can sneak into your product via compromised dependencies.

An Application Programming Interface (API) specifies the interface through which other programs can interact with a software component. It is a contract between the component and its clients.

When developing large systems, if you define the API of each components early, the development team can develop the components in parallel because the future behavior of the other components are now more predictable.

An API should be well-designed (i.e. should cater for the needs of its users) and well-documented.

When we write software consisting of multiple components, we need to define the API of each component.

One approach is to let the API emerge and evolve over time as we write code.

Another approach is to define the API up-front. Doing so allows us to develop the components in parallel.

We can use UML sequence diagrams to analyze the required interactions between components in order to discover the required API. Given below is an example.

Example:

As we analyze the interactions between components using sequence diagrams, we discover the API of those components. For example, the diagram above tells us that the MSLogic component API should have the methods:

• new()
• getWidth:int
• getHeight():int
• getRemainingMineCount():int

More details can be included to increase the precision of the method definitions before coding. Such precision is important to avoid misunderstandings between the developer of the class and developers of other classes that interact with this class.

• Operation: newGame(): void
• Description: Generates a new WxH minefield with M mines. Any existing minefield will be overwritten.
• Preconditions: None
• Postconditions: A new minefield is created. Game state is READY.

Preconditions are the conditions that must be true before calling this operation. Postconditions describe the system after the operation is complete. Note that post conditions do not say what happens during the operation. Here is another example:

• Operation: clearCellAt(int x, int y): void
• Description: Records the cell at x,y as cleared.
• Parameters: x, y coordinates of the cell
• Preconditions: game state is READY or IN_PLAY. x and y are in 0..(H-1) and 0..(W-1), respectively.
• Postconditions: Cell at x,y changes state to ZERO, ONE, TWO, THREE, …, EIGHT, or INCORRECTLY_CLEARED. Game state changes to IN_PLAY, WON or LOST as appropriate.

A library is a collection of modular code that is general and can be used by other programs.

These are the typical steps required to use a library.

1. Read the documentation to confirm that its functionality fits your needs
2. Check the license to confirm that it allows reuse in the way you plan to reuse it. For example, some libraries might allow non-commercial use only.
3. Download the library and make it accessible to your project. Alternatively, you can configure your dependency management tool to do it for you.
4. Call the library API from your code where you need to use the library functionality.

The overall structure and execution flow of a specific category of software systems can be very similar. The similarity is an opportunity to reuse at a high scale.

A software framework is a reusable implementation of a software (or part thereof) providing generic functionality that can be selectively customized to produce a specific application.

Some frameworks provide a complete implementation of a default behavior which makes them immediately usable.

A framework facilitates the adaptation and customization of some desired functionality.

Some frameworks cover only a specific components or an aspect.

Although both frameworks and libraries are reuse mechanisms, there are notable differences:

• Libraries are meant to be used ‘as is’ while frameworks are meant to be customized/extended. e.g., writing plugins for Eclipse so that it can be used as an IDE for different languages (C++, PHP, etc.), adding modules and themes to Drupal, and adding test cases to JUnit.

• Your code calls the library code while the framework code calls your code. Frameworks use a technique called inversion of control, aka the “Hollywood principle” (i.e. don’t call us, we’ll call you!). That is, you write code that will be called by the framework, e.g. writing test methods that will be called by the JUnit framework. In the case of libraries, your code calls libraries.

A platform provides a runtime environment for applications. A platform is often bundled with various libraries, tools, frameworks, and technologies in addition to a runtime environment but the defining characteristic of a software platform is the presence of a runtime environment.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service over the network, rather than a product running on a local machine. This means the actual hardware and software is located at a remote location, typically, at a large server farm, while users access them over the network. Maintenance of the hardware and software is managed by the cloud provider while users typically pay for only the amount of services they use. This model is similar to the consumption of electricity; the power company manages the power plant, while the consumers pay them only for the electricity used. The cloud computing model optimizes hardware and software utilization and reduces the cost to consumers. Furthermore, users can scale up/down their utilization at will without having to upgrade their hardware and software. The traditional non-cloud model of computing is similar to everyone buying their own generators to create electricity for their own use.

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Cloud computing can deliver computing services at three levels:

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) delivers computer infrastructure as a service. For example, a user can deploy virtual servers on the cloud instead of buying physical hardware and installing server software on them. Another example would be a customer using storage space on the cloud for off-site storage of data. Rackspace is an example of an IaaS cloud provider. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is another one.

2. Platform as a service (PaaS) provides a platform on which developers can build applications. Developers do not have to worry about infrastructure issues such as deploying servers or load balancing as is required when using IaaS. Those aspects are automatically taken care of by the platform. The price to pay is reduced flexibility; applications written on PaaS are limited to facilities provided by the platform. A PaaS example is the Google App Engine where developers can build applications using Java, Python, PHP, or Go whereas Amazon EC2 allows users to deploy application written in any language on their virtual servers.

3. Software as a service (SaaS) allows applications to be accessed over the network instead of installing them on a local machine. For example, Google Docs is an SaaS word processing software, while Microsoft Word is a traditional word processing software.