Two Ways to Visualize Method Invocations

Analogy making lies at the heart of object-oriented software development. Developers make analogies to objects in the domain of interest to yield software objects. It is this concept of classes and instances of these classes that make object orientation such a powerful paradigm. When designing object-oriented software, it is sometimes helpful to visualize more than one abstraction for any given solution. As any developer knows, there are several ways to implement a given solution. The act of visualizing different approaches to these abstractions will often yield something in between. The same idea can be applied to understanding and designing the behavioral aspects of software objects. Designing of the behavior of software objects equates to building methods for those objects and how these methods are invoked. There is more than one way to visualize these method invocations.

Method invocations can be visualized as the sending of a message. In this abstraction, the instance that makes the invocation can be thought of as the sender. The instance that implements the method can be though of as the receiver. The method name and method parameters can collectively be thought of as the message. This approach is illustrated below.



An alternative way to visualize method invocations is as the publishing of an event. In the event publishing abstraction, the instance that implements the method can be thought of as the subscriber. The instance that invokes the method can be thought of as the publisher. The method name and the method parameters can collectively be thought of as the event. This approach, not all that different from the first, is illustrated below.



Which approach is the right one? Either. Since this is simply an abstraction visualization strategy, the right approach is the one that yields the better code, and thus, the better software. However, some developers may find the message method invocation visualization approach to be more useful when designing single, one-time method invocations. The event method invocation visualization might prove more useful when designing a polymorphic method invocation over a set of instances.