The FizzBuzz kata

The first time I came over this kata was thanks to a post in which Matteo was looking for design problems. I reckon everyone has played FizzBuzz at school, so I already knew what it was about; I had in mind to try it sooner or later, and it looks like somehow I finally did.

Once I wrote my own solution, I was a little curious to compare it with others, so while googling around I landed on this page which states that

Michael Feathers and Emily Bache performed it at agile2008 when competing in "Programming with the stars" in python, in 4 minutes.

That made me feel a little inadequate, since my solution took a little more to emerge, and I guess it's not because I used Java. But, after all, I'm not Michael Feathers nor Emily Bache, so I guess it's all right.

The solution proposed follows the classic filter paradigm: you register some filters in a list (after all you want the program to say "FizzBuzz" and not "BuzzFizz") each of which processes the output of the previous one. The nice thing is that you can inject filters as you like, which is good: the main class itself has the only responsibility to iterate through the filters, whatever they might do.

My solution is somewhat different, as it is based on the decorator pattern, yet it is similar because you can still inject the decorator, which is built wrapping each rule in the outer one, and the main class has the only responsibility to ask its decorator to decorate the input. If no decorators are provided, a no-op default one is used: this is a small complication compared to the previous solution. Another complication is that the decorator actually knows it's wrapping another decorator, no-op decorator excluded, while a filter has no knowledge of whatsoever other object might operate on the input.

Anyway, the most important thing is that my design satisfies Matteo's (evolving) requirements and supports the Anti-If Campaign :-)

Of course, TDD was used :-)