Tutorials : Utility Based Development Approach; Applying Forward Thinking to Your Programming :

Utility Based Development Approach, Applying Forward Thinking to Your Programming

Programming is a challenge to most of us. It is a logical thinking process translated into a piece of code written in a particular programming language. Programming languages have evolved from machine language to today's high level languages such as Java, C++ etc. With the evolution of these languages, our outlook towards solving a problem has also evolved. We have gone through the transition from procedural thinking to Object- Oriented and most recently to the Aspect Orientation. In this article, we will consider another hidden aspect of programming,which I intend to name as "Utility Based Development".

Utility Based Development

Don't fret, it's not another completely new process. I find it's most useful to take this approach when I am actually ready to cut the code. Utility Based Development is an approach in which we are able to extend a specific use-case requirement to accommodate a broader requirement and also we are able to extract reusable utility components out of every module that can be reused by other modules. When we are working in a large-scale project, often programmers will start from a high-level design document. This design document gives us a high-level view of how different parts of the system interact with each other. It also tells us about the internal structure of each component within the system. It is often use-case centric and primarily focused towards accomplishing all the use-cases by specifying service components, their interaction mechanism and persistence of data.

However, ground reality of developing each component is often different. The design document does not tell us about each step involved in developing a component. While we want to achieve the specified component structure and the interaction to accomplish certain business process, we also want to do it in an efficient manner. The efficiency of a piece of code also relies upon how optimized the code is. Optimization of a component on the other hand depends on the optimization of individual classes that constitute the component.

For an example, imagine you are writing a hotel reservation application. This application will make use of components such as Reservation component, Invoice component, etc. All of these components will need to deal with dates in different formats such as British and American date formats. It would be better if we factor out the routines to format dates in another utility class and let individual components make use of the date utility class. This way the code is more optimized.

The above scenario highlights a case of Utility Based Development. It sounds simple and all of us at one time or another thought about it, but in this article, I will share some methods of making this approach more formal and help to apply a certain methodology to it.

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