A new Parsley Extension: The DynamicServices tag

I just pushed a new Parsley extension project to GitHub – support for the <DynamicService /> tag.

Typically in a project, I like to structure my services layers pretty cleanly – for each service I would declare the following:

• An interface which defines the services contract
• A concrete implementation of the interface, which abstracts away the RemoteObject
• A stub implementation of the interface, for testing when the services layer is unavailable

For example, a simple EchoService might look a little something like this:

// IEchoDelegate.as
public interface IEchoDelegate
{
     function echoMessage(source:String):AsyncToken;
}

// EchoDelegate.as
public class EchoDelegate
{
   [Inject]
   public function service:RemoteObject;

   public function echoMessage(source:String):AsyncToken
   {
      return service.echoMessage(source);
   }
}

Here, you can see the concrete delegate is really just boiler-plate code.  It’s pretty repetitive, and while I find lots of value in the pattern, the actual implementation can be a bore.

So, I put together a Parsley extension to generate these delegates on the fly.

Here’s an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<parsley:Objects>
   <fx:Declarations>
      <services:DynamicService type="{IEchoService}" endpoint="http://localhost:8080/testdrive/messagebroker/amf" destination="echoService" />
   </fx:Declarations>
</parsley:Objects>

This definition combines the Interface and the remote object defininition in the context. An implementation of the interface is generated on-the-fly at runtime, and is available to be injected into classes as required.

Eg:

// EchoCommand.as
	public class EchoCommand
	{
		[Inject]
		public var service:IEchoService;

		public function execute(message:EchoMessage):AsyncToken
		{
			return service.echo(message.source);
		}

		public function result(result:String):void
		{
			trace("Received from the server:" + result);
		}
	}

Source

The source for this is available now on github.  There’s also a demo project available here

A word of warning

Under the covers, this extension makes use of the ASCommons-Bytecode library to build an implementation of the interface.

Unfortunately, this dynamic goodness is not free, and incurs a one-off cost at startup when the ByteCode library parses the bytecode of the swf into memory.  As a result, you’ll notice that Parsley takes a little longer to intitialize than you might be used to.  This is a tradeoff that must be considered before using this approach.

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