Python Traits

Project can be found from GitHub.

About Traits

Traits are classes which contain methods that can be used to extend other classes, similar to mixins, with exception that traits do not use inheritance. Instead, traits are composed into other classes. That is; methods, properties and internal state are copied to master object.

The point is to improve code reusability by dividing code into simple building blocks that can be then combined into actual classes.

There is also a wikipedia article about Traits.

Motivation

Traits are meant to be small pieces of behavior (functions or classes) used to extend other objects in a flexible, dynamic manner. Being small and independent entities, they are easy to understand, maintain and test. Traits also give an alternative approach in Python to handle diamond inheritance cases due to fact that no inheritance is happening at all (not saying multiple inheritance is an issue in Python).

The dynamic nature of traits enables some interesting use cases that are unreachable for conventional inheritance; Any changes made to class or instance are applied immediately, and they affect whole application. In practice, this means it is possible to add new functionality to any class or instance and it can be from your own module, some 3rd party module (e.g Django) or even Python’s own internal classes (e.g. collections.OrderedDict).

For example, there is feature you would need from framework someone else has written. Only thing to do is to write traits for those classes that needs to be updated and extend them. After extending the classes, framework will behave based on those extended classes. Or if there is need to alter the behavior only some specific situation (or you just want to be careful), instances of classes can be extended only.

Other example would be a situation, where you discover a bug in 3rd party framework. Now you can create own solution safely, while waiting for the official patch to appear. Updating the framework code won’t override your extensions as they are applied dynamically. Your changes are only removed when you don’t need them anymore.

Basics

In the simplest form, traits are very similar to any class, that is inherited by some other class. That is a good way to approach traits in general; If you can inherit some class, then you can also use it as a trait. Let’s look an example:

.. code:: python
    from pytraits import extendable

    class Parent:
        def parent_function(self):
            return "Hello World"

    # Traditional inheritance
    class TraditionalChild(Parent):
        pass

    @extendable
    class ExceptionalChild:
        pass

    # Composing as trait
    ExceptionalChild.add_traits(Parent)

In above example both TraditionalChild and Exceptional child have parent_function method. Only small difference is that ExceptionalChild is inherited from object, not Parent.

Effective use

To be effective with traits, one must have some knowledge about how to write code that can be reused effectively through out the system. It also helps to know something about good coding practices, for example:

Especially in Law of Demeter, the interfaces tend to bloat because many small and specific functions needs to be implemented for classes. Traits can help to keep interfaces more manageable since one trait would contain methods only for some specific situation.

Vertical and Horizontal program architecture

Traits can really shine, when the application is layered both vertically and horizontally. Vertical layer basically means different components of the system, such as: User, Address, Account, Wallet, Car, Computer, etc. Horinzontal layers would contain: Security, Serialization, Rendering, etc. One approach with traits for above layering would be to create modules for horizontal parts and then create trait for each type object needing that behavior. Finally, in your main module, you would combine traits into classes.

Example:

core/account.py

from pytraits import extendable

# Very simple address class
@extendable
class Address:
    def __init__(self, street, number):
        self.__street = street
        self.__number = number

core/wallet.py

from pytraits import extendable

# Very simple wallet class
@extendable
class Wallet:
    def __init__(self, money=0):
        self.__money = money

horizontal/html_rendering.py

# This is a trait for address rendering
class Address:
    def render(self):
        data = dict(street=self.__street, number=self.__number)
        return "<p>Address: {street} {number}</p>".format(**data)

class Wallet:
    def render(self):
        # It is extremely straight-forward to render money situation.
        return "<p>Money: 0€</p>"

__main__.py

from core import Address, Wallet
from horizontal import html_rendering

Address.add_traits(html_rendering.Address)
Wallet.add_traits(html_rendering.Wallet)

With this approach, if there becomes a need to support other rendering mechanisms then just add new module and write rendering specific code there.