CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javamaven
Stephan
Stephan

Reputation: 4443

Software design and cyclic Maven dependencies

I have an issue in my application design. I have a item viewer application, let's call it V and want to extend it with an editor project, let's call it E.

E depends on many classes of V, because it provides a graphical preview of the items. So E there is a Maven dependency E->V. Now I want to integrate E into V, because users should be able to start the editor out of the viewer. That means I also have a Maven dependency V->E which causes a dependency cycle. I tried different scope values but was not able to break the cycle. How can I achieve this?

The V project is a very monolithic and not well-structured bunch of code and I don't want to divide it. In the E project I can do anything I want (in fact it already consists of many small projects).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 62

Answers (2)

Henry
Henry

Reputation: 43728

One way is to split out the API parts of each project (basically the interfaces that are called from the other). This would give you dependencies like this:

v -> Vapi
E -> Vapi
V -> Eapi
E -> Eapi

and there are no cycles.

If you don't want to split V a scheme like this may work:

E -> V
E -> Eapi
V -> Eapi

Upvotes: 1

chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-
chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-

Reputation: 77177

You need to write your view code to work with an interface instead of a class; this is a best practice in any case. Put the relevant interface files in module foo-api, and then have foo-domain and foo-view depend on foo-api.

Upvotes: 1

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