In the last week I've been working on writing a tutorial for our MvcTools component. For this tutorial I've also written a very simple "HelloMvc" application , not only to have something to write the tutorial about, but also to test how the component would do in a more real life situation, outside of the unit testing framework.

I realized during the development of this sample application, is that while writing software, you can never really implement things so that it does exactly what everybody wants and expects. During the development of our MvcTools component we're run into a few of those occasions. One of those is the naming conventions our default controller uses for action's methods. In our first implementation we would always require the method naming of "doActionName()".

Some of our users might want to do something else, but would now have to rewrite the whole class. That is of course unnecessary, as Object Oriented programming excels at reuse of code. However, in order for inheritance to work, all the functionality need to be separated as much as possible into their own methods.

In the re-factored version we now have split out the method name algorithm to its own method, createActionMethodName(). This allows for easier customization of code by inheriting from this class and just overriding this method. It also makes testing easier, as now it is possible to test the name generating algorithm. To illustrate this, we actually found an issue while writing the tests for this new method.