Details
Minor Description
This is the next step from https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SANDBOX-340 – as instructed I'm finally hoping to get the code in the right place and hopefully this is something that the functor component could do with.
Whereas initially I just started with the summarizer component, I have added now the second one, the "aggregator" as they are somehow related. If this code proves to be useful to functor in any way, it would actually be good to get some feedback on these 2 to see if the class hierarchy can in fact be changed to share some common functionality as I feel (probably due to the similar needs that lead to writing/using these components) that somehow they should share a common base.
In brief, the 2 components:
- aggregator: this just allows for data to be aggregated in a user defined way (e.g. stored in a list for the purpose of averaging, computing the arithmetic median etc). The classes provided actually offer the implementation for storing data in a list and computing the above-mentioned values or summing up everything.
- timed summarizer: this is another variation of the aggreator, however, it adds the idea of regular "flushes", so based on a timer it will reset the value and start summing/aggregating the data again. Rather than using an aggregator which would store the whole data series (possibly for applying more complex formulas), this component just computes on the fly on each request the formula and stores the result of it. (Which does mean things like computing arithmetic mean, median etc would be difficult to compute without knowing upfront how many calls will be received – i.e. how many elements we will be required to summarize/aggregate.) So the memory footprint of running this is much smaller – even though, as I said, it achieves similar results. I have only provided a summarizer which operates on integers, but obviously others for float, double etc can be created if we go ahead with this design.
Hopefully the above make sense; this code has resulted from finding myself writing similar components to these a few times and because it's always been either one type (e.g. aggregator) or another (summarizer) I haven't given quite possibly enough thought to the class design to join these 2. Also, unfortunately, the time I sat down to make these components a bit more general and submitted issue 340 was nearly 3 months ago so I'm trying to remember myself all the ideas I had at a time so bear with me please if these are still a bit fuzzy
However, if you can make use of these I'm quite happy to elaborate on areas that are unclear and obviously put some effort into getting these components to the standards required to put these into a release.