The Properties Pattern

Last monday Steve published another lengthy post on what he called The Universal Design Pattern. As I read through it, it reminded me of my personal walk through some of the issues described there. It was in the JDK 1.1 days, when the JavaBeans specification had just come out. The JavaBeans event system identified the properties as strings, which led me to try what Steve calls the Properties Pattern in a never-finished project that I used a test-bed int the late 90's: a Java port of a Monopoly-like game I wrote in C++ back in 1994 . It was an interesting experiment, and I had to deal with many of the issues described in Steve's post. Anyway working with string-based properties in a language like Java is quite uncomfortable to say the least.

However, this does not mean that you need a dynamic or a prototype-based language to enjoy the advantages of this approach. In the end, each property has some pieces of metadata that could encapsulated into... a type. You just have to add an API that makes it convenient to deal with this kind of properties. Frameworks such as Guice have really raised the bar on what can be done getting the most out of the Java type system and the levels of type-safety that can be achieved.