Singleton

It makes sense for the configuration for an application to be a sort of Singleton.

In the most common case, to instantiate a Config object, you would do:

MyConfig cfg = ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);

People tends to use this as:

class MyApp {
    private static MyConfig cfg =
        ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);

    public void doSomething() {
        UserInterface ui = new UserInterface(cfg);
        Model model = new Model(cfg);
        ui.setModel(model);
        // do something more with cfg...
    }
}

The problem is that, it may be not very practical to pass the cfg object inside complex applications, and if you use the ConfigFactory.create() in multiple places you’ll end up in having multiple instances of the cfg objects. And this may not be what you need.

For instance, if you have a J2EE Web application, to have a config object inside your servlets, you should configure a ServletContextListener in your web.xml and bind the configuration object to the ServletContext.

Then retrieve the cfg object in your servlets in the init() method.

Example:

public class MyServletContextListener
    implements ServletContextListener {

    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {
        MyConfig cfg = ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);
        sce.getServletContext()
            .setAttribute("com.acme.foo.bar.MyConfig", cfg);
    }

    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent sce) {
        sce.getServletContext()
            .removeAttribute("com.acme.foo.bar.MyConfig");
    }
}

// then in your servlets

public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {
    private MyConfig cfg = null;

    public void init(ServletConfig config)
              throws ServletException {
        cfg = (MyConfig)config.getServletContext()
            .getAttribute("com.acme.foo.bar.MyConfig");
    }

    public void destroy() {
        cfg = null;
    }

    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req,
                        HttpServletResponse resp)
        throws ServletException, IOException {

        // do something with cfg;

    }
}

I don’t dislike the above example, since it’s a kind of dependency injection mechanism (you don’t necessarily need a framework to do IoC) and I usually prefer this over Singletons (See SingletonsAreEvil), but… this is still pretty much of code. Boilerplate code. The kind of code OWNER is supposed to remove.

So, this is why a sort of Singleton has been provided: I called it ConfigCache, since it’s a little bit more than a mere (evil) Singleton. And this makes me feel a bit better about it :-)

The ConfigCache

So, as we’ve seen many times before, you should be familiar with the ConfigFactory:

MyConfig instance = ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);

The same way you can use the new ConfigCache:

MyConfig instance = ConfigCache.getOrCreate(MyConfig.class);

The difference is that, when using ConfigFactory a new instance of the MyConfig object is created every time, instead when using the ConfigCache, instances are returned from an internal cache.

MyConfig firstFromFactory = ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);
MyConfig secondFromFactory = ConfigFactory.create(MyConfig.class);
// firstFromFactory not same as secondFromFactory

MyConfig firstFromCache = ConfigCache.getOrCreate(MyConfig.class);
MyConfig secondFromCache = ConfigCache.getOrCreate(MyConfig.class);
// firstFromCache same as secondFromCache

You can assign an id to an instance:

MyConfig firstFromCache = ConfigCache.getOrCreate("foo", MyConfig.class);
MyConfig secondFromCache = ConfigCache.getOrCreate("foo", MyConfig.class);
MyConfig thirdFromCache = ConfigCache.getOrCreate("bar", MyConfig.class);
// firstFromCache same as secondFromCache
// thirdFromCache not same as secodFromCache or firstFromCache

The id is defined as java.lang.Object, but you can use a String such as a name, as in the above example.

In some cases, it may be useful list all configuration objects in an application, for instance for debugging. This can be accomplished using the ConfigCache.list() method, which returns a set of the id objects in the cache. This set can be used to iterate over all configuration objects in the cache, for instance as follows.

for (Object id : ConfigCache.list()) {
   Config cfg = ConfigCache.get(id);
   // do something
}

As for the ConfigFactory you can pass a list of imports to ConfigCache. In fact the ConfigCache interface is pretty similar to ConfigFactory:

public final class org.aeonbits.owner.ConfigCache {
  public static <T extends Config> T getOrCreate(Class<? extends T> clazz, Map<?, ?>... imports);
  public static <T extends Config> T getOrCreate(Factory factory, Class<? extends T> clazz, Map<?, ?>... imports);
  public static <T extends Config> T getOrCreate(Object id, Class<? extends T> clazz, Map<?, ?>... imports);
  public static <T extends Config> T getOrCreate(Factory factory, Object id, Class<? extends T> clazz, Map<?, ?>... imports);
  public static <T extends Config> T get(Object id);
  public static <T extends Config> T add(Object id, T config);
  public static void clear();
  public static <T extends Config> T remove(Object id);
}

The ConfigCache is designed to be thread safe, so you don’t have to worry about concurrent access.

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