Meet Observer

[SOUND] Hello I'm Craig and I'm a developer. 0:00 In this workshop we're gonna explore the extremely popular design pattern, 0:06 Observer. 0:10 We'll explore what makes the pattern so popular and 0:11 we'll also walk through the why, the how, and the when you should use it. 0:13 First though, 0:18 just want to remind you that there are speed controls on the video player. 0:19 Make use of those to speed me up or slow me down to your tastes. 0:22 Always remember to check the teacher's notes on each video. 0:25 I've drop some prerequisites on this one. 0:28 So take a moment and 0:30 make sure that we're on the same page before we get started here. 0:30 And finally, don't forget to hit up the community to discuss these ideas more. 0:33 I'm excited to take the time to walk through the Observer pattern with you. 0:37 It's a very powerful and commonly used pattern. 0:41 It's ability to make code more extensible is what makes it so popular. 0:43 So you'll see it used all over the place as a solution. 0:47 Now, I guarantee that you've interacted with this pattern already. 0:49 It' everywhere. 0:52 I mean, you're literally seeing it at play right now. 0:54 See the timeline on this video? 0:56 The toolbar is observing where you are in this video. 0:58 As you progress through this video, it changes, right? 1:02 It updates both the number of seconds as well as the rendering of the progress bar. 1:05 So in the video example, the video itself represents the master object, or 1:10 subject as it's often referred to. 1:14 It's the one portion of the one-to-many. 1:17 The many side of things, the dependent objects or observers as they're usually 1:20 called, those are the number of seconds displayed and the progress bar. 1:24 So the subject changes its state and 1:28 its observers are notified and update themselves accordingly. 1:31 So with that in mind, you can probably think 1:35 of a couple other examples where you can interact with this pattern at work today. 1:37 Now, for instance, I was just using a spreadsheet. 1:41 When I updated the cell with my percentage complete on a project that I'm working on, 1:44 the graph changed. 1:47 And so did several other fields that were observing that value. 1:48 Those other objects were notified by the changes I made in my cells. 1:52 Now the Observer pattern is at play in the compound design pattern MVC. 1:55 The V in MVC, or view layer, makes heavy use of this pattern. 1:59 The view observes the model. 2:04 Changes to the model will notify the view. 2:06 Now UI libraries like the ones that you've interacted with, like JavaFX or 2:09 Android apps, rely heavily on this pattern to display the current state of the model. 2:12 Now, this pattern is often referred to as Pub/Sub which is short for 2:17 Publish/Subscribe. 2:21 Now this might help things stick. 2:23 A newspaper is published and delivered to all of it's subscribers, right? 2:24 And that makes sense. 2:28 You get the paper because you have a subscription, and 2:29 it only comes when a new issue is published. 2:31 All right, all right, enough analogies. 2:34 So let's go take a quick look at the UML so 2:36 you can see the suggested implementation. 2:38 So if we do a quick search for the Observer pattern, 2:41 we'll see here that the first result here is from Wikipedia. 2:44 So let's click this. 2:49 Let's scroll down to the UML. 2:50 I'm going to go ahead I'm going to click this. 2:51 It's gonna open it up and I'm gonna zoom in on it. 2:52 So we can take a more detailed look here. 2:55 Okay, so we see that there's an Observer interface, and 2:57 it has a method called notify. 3:00 There's several concrete implementations here, right? 3:03 So Concrete A and B, and they also implement, have a method called notify. 3:06 So there's a little diamond here on a class called subject, 3:11 and what that means is there's an aggregation of these observers here and 3:15 they're being stored in this observer collection. 3:19 And they get added by calling a thing called registerObserver, and 3:20 you pass in the observer or unregister to remove it. 3:24 And then there is a method called notifyObservers, and 3:26 this is the pseudo code here. 3:29 Basically it says for each one of these observers, loop through and 3:31 call the notify method. 3:34 So basically what this is saying is that any object that 3:36 implements the observer interface can be notified. 3:39 So, now don't worry, you'll get your head wrapped around it here in a bit. 3:43 Just remember that this is a suggestion of how to implement the pattern. 3:46 There are numerous ways of achieving this pattern in code and 3:50 we'll hit them up separately here in a bit. 3:52 Now these names aren't required, but they are common. 3:56 So you can start to recognize them when you see them. 3:58 While we're here, why don't we go get the starter files for application installed? 4:00 So in the teacher's notes there's a link to a rebo. 4:05 I went ahead and copied that and pasted it. 4:07 Here we are on GitHub. 4:09 I'm gonna choose clone or download, I'm gonna grab the URL here for SSH, and 4:11 I'm gonna pop over to my InteliJ, which you'll see is running 2016.2.1. 4:17 And I'm gonna check out from version control, use GitHub, 4:23 I'm gonna put in the password for this. 4:28 So I'm gonna come here and I'm going to paste in. 4:35 And want to choose clone. 4:39 And it says would you like to open? 4:44 I'm going to say yes. 4:45 It says it's an unlinked Gradle project. 4:47 I'm gonna say go ahead and import the Gradle project. 4:48 And I'm gonna click it again. 4:50 And just click all the defaults here, okay. 4:53 Okay, so I've built this was several different modules where 5:07 we can break up the different use cases that we're going to do. 5:10 So go ahead and just leave all of those checked by default and click OK. 5:13 When you take a look here under Project, you can see that the different ones here 5:20 are in bold are the modules that we'll be looking at here just a bit. 5:24 So now that we've seen it have a pretty basic understanding, 5:28 what do you say we put it into practice? 5:30 This pattern and its usage has evolved along with Java. 5:32 I think a good approach is to walk through a few of the iterations 5:36 since you'll encounter them in your journeys. 5:39 We'll discuss the pros and cons of each approach. 5:41 Let's start with the original implementation. 5:44 It's been around since version 1.1. 5:46 So let's dust it off and dive into it next. 5:48