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Multiple versions of a component - design question

 
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Hello,

Have a question about a problem and its solution.

There is an application which uses a component (say a tax calculator - taxcalc.jar). The requirement is that the application should be able to use multiple versions of the component based on some runtime value. This means that the multiple versions of taxcalc classes should coexist in the same JVM at the same time and the application could use, for example, classes from version 1.1 for one user and version 1.3 for another user.

I could think one way to do this:

Design the classes in the component to have a version as part of the package name. The application could use the runtime value to create the package name (and fully qualified class name String), use the reflection to instantiate the correct version of the class and then proceed using the instance.

Wish some designers/architects here could review this. Are there any other/better solutions?

Thanks in advance,

-Milind
 
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You should look into OSGi.
 
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Milind Mahajan wrote:
There is an application which uses a component (say a tax calculator - taxcalc.jar). The requirement is that the application should be able to use multiple versions of the component based on some runtime value. This means that the multiple versions of taxcalc classes should coexist in the same JVM at the same time and the application could use, for example, classes from version 1.1 for one user and version 1.3 for another user.



That is not a requirement, that is a technical implementation.

What do your customers actually want *to do*?
 
Milind Mahajan
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Thanks for the response.

May be I mixed my technical thoughts with the requirement that I got. This is the requirement -> The customer wants the application to be able to use different versions of the tax calculator based on some configuration/user specific value.

What are your comments on the solution?

-Milind
 
Ilja Preuss
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And why does he want to be able to do that? Where's the business value?
 
Hong Anderson
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Ilja Preuss wrote:And why does he want to be able to do that? Where's the business value?


Actually, this is more technical than business.

For example, if we have a server application that supports some kind of client and after that we update server code to support a new version of client, and we'll retire support for the old client eventually but not immediately. How do we do?

We can build a big jar that supports both versions of client or we can have 2 jars, client1.0.jar and client2.0.jar, and load a library dynamically based on a request. If we do the latter, when we want to retire support for client 1.0, we just remove it, and change code to load only client2.0.jar, in case that a request come from client 1.0, reply message "Please update your client to version 2.0".

If there are just 2 versions, it might still be manageable to have a big jar, but what if we have 3, 4, or 5 versions, and we have plan to retire version 1, 2, 3, 4?
 
Milind Mahajan
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Thanks Kengkaj.

Yes. It is a technical requirement.

Any comments on the solution I outlined? Or any other?

-Milind
 
Hong Anderson
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You can check OSGi. I don't know the detail, but it supports versioning.
 
Ilja Preuss
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What a good solution will look like depends a lot on what the actual reason behind the request is. So I really feel I can't give a good recommendation before you tell us the business requirement behind the technical requirement.
 
Milind Mahajan
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I wish I could add more to the requirement that I stated earlier. But all I got was the technical requirement.

Anyway, thanks both of you for the responses.

-Milind
 
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I think it is supposed to be different function limitation, the accessable function depends on the configurations.
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