Proxy-o-Matic

Contribution Overview

Proxy-o-Matic lets you create dynamic proxies fast and in an homogeneous way. Groovy has the option to create proxy implementations of interfaces, abstract classes and even concrete classes based on closures and maps. You can see them as a poor man's version of anonymous inner classes, but they are not an exact replacement as you can't qualify method calls with this nor super.

Proxies created with Proxy-o-Matic also suffer from the this/super problem but they add a couple of features that the standard proxy creation mechanism doesn't offer:

• ability to define overloaded methods
• ability to call its own methods from within
• ability to proxy more than 1 interface at a time
• ability to proxy from Expandos as well

Here are a couple of examples that show how to use Proxy-o-Matic

import static org.kordamp.groovy.util.ProxyOMatic.proxy

interface Foo { String foo() }
interface Bar { String bar() }
interface FooBar extends Foo, Bar {
   String foobar()
}

def f = proxy( Foo ) {
   foo { -> "Foo" }
}
assert f instanceof Foo
assert f.foo() == "Foo"

def fb = proxy( FooBar ) {
   foo { -> "Foo" }
   bar { -> "Bar" }
   foobar { -> foo() + bar() }
}
assert fb instanceof FooBar
assert fb.foo() == "Foo"
assert fb.bar() == "Bar"
assert fb.foobar() == "FooBar"

interface Fooz extends Foo {
   String foo( String n )
}

def fz = proxy( Fooz ) {
   foo { -> "Foo" }
   foo { String n -> "Foo$n".toString() }
}
assert fz instanceof Fooz
assert fz.foo() == "Foo"
assert fz.foo("Groovy") == "FooGroovy"

def bf = proxy( Bar, [Foo] ) {
   foo { -> "Foo" }
   bar { -> "Bar" }
}
assert bf instanceof Bar
assert bf instanceof Foo
assert bf.foo() == "Foo"
assert bf.bar() == "Bar"

Credit must be given when credit is due, in this case Proxy-o-Matic emerged from an idea Alex Tkachman pitched at the Groovy-dev mailing list, thanks Alex for the marvelous idea of a Proxy builder DSL.

Team Members

Andres Almiray [aalmiray at users dot sourceforge dot net]

Download

proxyomatic-0.5.jar
source

Installing

Just drop proxyomatic-<version>.jar into $GROOVY_HOME/lib or ~/.groovy/lib and your done.

Pre-requisites

Have the latest stable version of Groovy installed, that's all baby!

Documentation

Using Proxy-o-Matic is pretty straight forward: call any of ProxyOMatic's proxy() methods. To achieve a DSL like usage remember to import statically ProxyOMatic.proxy. Proxy-o-Matic can only create proxies from interfaces for the time being, abstract/concrete classes will be supported in a following version. These are the method signatures you would need to work with

• proxy( Class type, source )
• proxy( Class type, List<Class>, source )
• proxy( Class type, Class[], source )

where source can be any of [Closure, Map, Expando]

Another thing to consider is that given the nature of closures in Groovy the following would be treated as equivalent definitions:

interface Baz {
   String baz( Object b )
}
def b = proxy( Baz ) {
   baz { "BAZ" }
   baz { String n -> n } 
}

assert b.baz("gotcha") == "gotcha"

So please avoid using the default parameter and always qualify the number of parameters a closure must have.

Contributing

Please contact the team members by e-mail.

Community

Mailing List(s)

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Mailing+Lists

Issue tracker

http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10242