Rediscovering the NetBeans Lookup Library (II)

In my previous blog entry about the NetBeans Lookup Library we learned how to look-up stuff inside what we called "travel bags".

In this entry we'll take a quick look at how to create our own travel bags.

The global travel bag

The NetBeans Lookup Library has a special travel bag known as the "Global Lookup".

You can get a reference to this huge travel bag as follows:

    Lookup globalBag = Lookup.getDefault();

This global bag contains lots of things, and its contents may vary depending on the application you're running.

In a standalone application, the "Global Lookup" contains a list of all services registered in your application using the jar file service provider interface.

Say your application has at least tree jar files, named A.jar, B.jar and C.jar (and our well known org-openide-util.jar as well, of course).

Say that each one of those jar files contains a plain text file named "META-INF/services/my.package.MyInterface" and that the content of that file is as follows:

  • The content of A.jar/META-INF/services/my.package.MyInterface is "my.package.MyAImpl"
  • The content of B.jar/META-INF/services/my.package.MyInterface is "my.package.MyBImpl"
  • The content of C.jar/META-INF/services/my.package.MyInterface is "my.package.MyCImpl"

By using the NetBeans Lookup Library you can find all the implementations of the my.package.MyInterface interface bundled in your application:

    Lookup global = Lookup.getDefault();
    Collection impls =
      global.lookup( my.package.MyInterface.class );

So the collection "impls" above will contain instances of "my.package.MyAImpl", "my.package.MyBImpl" and "my.package.MyCImpl".

What I mean is that the global lookup can be used to find implementations of interfaces registered using the "META-INF/services" directory.

And, more importantly, that it doesn't matter how many jar files you add, but the Global Lookup will always find those implementations for you.

If you run your application inside the NetBeans Rich Client Platform you can use the global lookup to find some more interesting stuff, such as the contents of the "layer.xml" files of your modules, for instance.

So, to summarize: the Global Lookup contains information about your application, including all services registered using the jar-file service provider mechanism.

Creating your own travel bags

That's cool and easy but, how do we create our own travel bags? How do we place stuff inside them? Let's review the different ways to create travel bags.

Travel bags with a single object

To create a Lookup object with a single object you may use the Lookups class (an utility class used to create travel bags).

    Lookup myBag = Lookups.singleton( "Hello, world");

The resulting travel bag will contain a single object (a String in this case) and the results of this Lookup will be fixed and not allowed to change.

Travel bags with many objects

The Lookups utility class contains methods to create travel bags with a variable number of objects:

    Lookup myBag = Lookups.fixed( "Hello", "World" );

The resulting bag will contain two objects (strings in this class) and you won't be able to modify its contents.

Travel bags of travel bags

You can also combine the contents of different bags inside a bigger one using a ProxyLookup like this:

    Lookup helloBag = Lookups.singleton("Hello");
    Lookup worldBag = Lookups.singleton("World");
    Lookup helloWorldBag =
      new ProxyLookup( helloBag, worldBag );

So "helloWorldBag" will contain the contents of "helloBag" and of "worldBag".

The interesting feature of this "combined" lookup object is that if the contents of any of the original bags change, then the result of the "combined" lookup will also change!!

Your own custom travel bags

But how can we create our own travel bags, you ask? Well, the very first thing you need is an InstanceContent object to hold the stuff in your bag. And then you create an AbstractLookup (which is, peculiarly, not abstract) with it. Like this:

    InstanceContent contents = new InstanceContent();
    Lookup myTravelBag = new AbstractLookup( contents );
    contents.add("Hello");
    contents.add( new Integer(5) );
    contents.add("Goodbye");

That's easy, isn't it?

Summary and... what next?

So in the previous entry we've seen how to look up stuff in travel bags, and in this entry we've seen how to create travel bags.

We're almost all set. What next, you ask? Well, in the next entry we'll see what the NetBeans Lookup Library has to do with... rabbits!!

Until next time, Antonio

· permalink · netbeans · netbeans lookup library ·
blog comments powered by Disqus