Benjamin Tan's Learnings & Writings

Today, we’ll look at one of the most useful patterns - The Observer.

This is what the GoF have to say about the Observer:

Define a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified and updated automatically.

We shall use the UML diagram to help us understand the pattern:

Observer uml (Credits: http://www.wikipedia.com/)

The Subject

We begin with the Subject. This is the object that we are interested in when it’s state changes.

Subject has an observerCollection field. As it’s name suggests, this is typically a list collection (Array, List, etc). This stores a collection of Observers which we will take a look next.

The Observer

The parent Observer defines one method - notify(). Classes which inherit the Observer (ConcreteObserverA, ConcreteObserverB) are expected to implement notify().

PUB/SUB

This pattern is also known as the Publisher/Subscriber, or PUB/SUB for short.

Pubsub

Let’s find out why:

Subscribing and Unsubscribing

If the Subject needs to inform certain Observers, then it calls the registerObserver(observer). Similarly, once it can choose to remove any Observer by calling unregisterObserver(observer).

Publishing

Here’s where the fun starts. Let’s see some code that implements the UML diagram above:

class Subject
  def initialize
    @observers = []
  end

  def notify_observers
    @observers.each do |observer|
      observer.notify
    end
  end

  def register_observer(observer)
    @observers << observer
  end

  def unregister_observer(observer)
    @observers.delete(observer)
  end
end

Then the Observer:

class ObserverOne
  def notify
    puts "Observer 1 called."
  end
end

class ObserverTwo
  def notify
    puts "Observer 2 called."
  end
end

Then we add our observers:

subject = Subject.new
subject.register_observer(ObserverOne.new)
subject.register_observer(ObserverTwo.new)

Now, whenever Subject‘s state changes, it just has to call notify_observers:

class Subject 
  # …  
  def change_variable
    # …
    notify_observers
  end
end

Key Takeaways

The Observer pattern great for reducing the coupling between different components when these components need to be informed about changes.

By separating the Subject and the Observer, we have a clean separation of concerns.

Examples of Observer in use

Ruby has is very own Observable module, so there’s really no need to implement one your own. See the documentation. Notice that the methods implemented are pretty similar.

Rails makes use of observers heavily. Here’s a typical example:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_create :send_email

  def send_email
    #send a welcome email
  end
end

Thanks for reading!

References

Olsen, R. (2008) Design patterns in Ruby. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, p.95-110.

Gamma, E. (1995) Design patterns. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, p.293-303.

Pattern #3: Observer