Design and Architectural Principles - Java 8 Lambdas - page 141

But this would mean that every time we wanted to add in a new set of time points to the plot,
we would have to modify the MetricDataGraph class. We can resolve this issue by introdu-
cing an abstraction, which I'll call a TimeSeries , that represents a series of points in time.
Now our MetricDataGraph API can be simplified to not depend upon the different types of
metric that it needs to display, as shown in Example 8-39 .

Example 8-39. Simplified MetricDataGraph API
class class MetricDataGraph MetricDataGraph {

public public void void addTimeSeries ( TimeSeries values );

}

Each set of metric data can then implement the TimeSeries interface and be plugged in. For
example, we might have concrete classes called UserTimeSeries , SystemTimeSeries , and
IoTimeSeries . If we wanted to add, say, the amount of CPU time that gets stolen from a
machine if it's virtualized, then we would add a new implementation of TimeSeries called
StealTimeSeries . MetricDataGraph has been extended but hasn't been modified.

Higher-order functions also exhibit the same property of being open for extension, despite
being closed for modification. A good example of this is the ThreadLocal class that we en-
countered earlier. The ThreadLocal class provides a variable that is special in the sense that
each thread has a single copy for it to interact with. Its static withInitial method is a
higher-order function that takes a lambda expression that represents a factory for producing
an initial value.

This implements the open/closed principle because we can get new behavior out of
ThreadLocal without modifying it. We pass in a different factory method to withInitial
and get an instance of ThreadLocal with different behavior. For example, we can use
ThreadLocal to produce a DateFormatter that is thread-safe with the code in
Example 8-40 .

Example 8-40. A ThreadLocal date formatter
// One implementation
ThreadLocal < DateFormat > localFormatter
= ThreadLocal . withInitial (() -> new new SimpleDateFormat ());

// Usage
DateFormat formatter = localFormatter . get ();