Using factory classes in Ant tasks

So you have this nice factory class that prevents your client code from knowing the implementation class of the instances it needs to create and that lets it program to an API only.

Of course, at some point somebody needs to know the implementation class. Since the factory is the one creating instances, it either needs to know itself or be told. And since the factory is probably in the same package as the API, it shouldn’t know the implementation class itself, since that would tie the API package to the implementation package. So the factory needs to be told:

public class MyFactory {

  private static Class implementationClass = null;

  private MyFactory() {
    // Utility class
  }

  /**
   * Create a new instance.
   * @param data Data needed to initialize the instance
   * @return The newly created instance
   */
  public static MyInterface newInstance(final Object data) {
      assertImplementationClass();
      final Class clazz = implementationClass;
      if (data == null) {
        try {
          final Constructor constructor = clazz.getConstructor();
          result = (MyInterface) constructor.newInstance(
              new Object[0]);
        } catch (final Exception e) {
          result = null;
        }
      } else {
        final Constructor[] constructors = clazz.getConstructors();
        for (int i = 0; result == null && i < constructors.length; 
            i++) {
          final Constructor constructor = constructors[i];
          if (constructor.getParameterTypes().length == 1
          && constructor.getParameterTypes()[0].isInstance(data)) {
            try {
              result = (MyInterface) constructor.newInstance(
                  new Object[]{data});
            } catch (final Exception e) {
              result = null;
            }
          }
        }
    }

    return result;
  }

  /**
   * Register a class that implements the interface.
   */
  public static void registerImplementation(
      final Class implementation) {
    implementationClass = implementation;
  }

  /**
   * Unregister the implementation class.
   */
  public static void unregisterImplementation() {
    implementationClass = null;
  }

  private static void assertImplementationClass() {
    if (implementationClass == null) {
      throw new IllegalStateException(
          "Implementation class not set");
    }
  }

}

Now, who’s going to tell the factory what class to instantiate? There must be some entry point in the application where this happens. In your tests (you do write tests, right?), you can do that in the set up method. In a web application, you can do that in the ServletContextListener.

Ant

But what about in Ant tasks? You could create an Ant task that does just that and call it from a dependent target:

  <target name="--init-factory" unless="factory.inited">
    <property name="impl.class" 
        value="com.mycompany.myapp.MyImplementation"/>
    <taskdef name="register-impl"
        classname="com.mycompany.myapp.ant.RegisterTask" 
        classpath="..."/>
    <register-impl classname="${impl.class}"/>
    <property name="factory.inited" value="true"/>
  </target>

However, that doesn’t work. So what’s up?

Debugging Ant tasks

Our Ant task seems so simple that it is hard to see what could be wrong with it. So we want to debug it and find out.

You can debug Ant tasks by setting the environment variable ANT_OPTS:

SET ANT_OPTS=-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=6000,server=y,suspend=n

Now when you run your Ant script, you can attach your debugger on port 6000. You may want to use the input task to have the build wait while you attach your debugger.

Debugging reveals something interesting: The registerImplementation method does get called with the right parameter, but when newInstance is called, implementationClass is still null. Apparently Ant is doing some fancy classloader stuff that gets in our way.

The solution is to have the Ant task set a system property that the factory uses:

  private static void assertImplementationClass() {
    if (implementationClass == null) {
      final String className = (String) 
          System.getProperties().get(IMPLEMENTATION_CLASS_PROPERTY);
      if (StringUtils.isBlank(className)) {
        throw new IllegalStateException("Implementation class not set");
      }
      try {
        registerImplementation(Class.forName(className));
      } catch (final ClassNotFoundException e) {
        throw new IllegalStateException("Invalid implementation class: " 
            + className + "\n" + e.getLocalizedMessage());
      }
    }
  }

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