Scala Best Practices: Trait Inheritance vs Enumeration

Question

I'm currently experimenting with Scala and looking for best practices. I found myself having two opposite approaches to solving a single problem. I'd like to know which is better and why, which is more conventional, and if maybe you know of some other better approaches. The second one looks prettier to me.

1. Enumeration-based solution

import org.squeryl.internals.DatabaseAdapter
import org.squeryl.adapters.{H2Adapter, MySQLAdapter, PostgreSqlAdapter}
import java.sql.Driver

object DBType extends Enumeration {
  val MySql, PostgreSql, H2 = Value

  def fromUrl(url: String) = {
    url match {
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:mysql:") => Some(MySql)
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:postgresql:") => Some(PostgreSql)
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:h2:") => Some(H2)
      case _ => None
    }
  }
}

case class DBType(typ: DBType) {
  lazy val driver: Driver = {
    val name = typ match {
      case DBType.MySql => "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
      case DBType.PostgreSql => "org.postgresql.Driver"
      case DBType.H2 => "org.h2.Driver"
    }
    Class.forName(name).newInstance().asInstanceOf[Driver]
  }
  lazy val adapter: DatabaseAdapter = {
    typ match {
      case DBType.MySql => new MySQLAdapter
      case DBType.PostgreSql => new PostgreSqlAdapter
      case DBType.H2 => new H2Adapter
    }
  }
}

2. Singleton-based solution

import org.squeryl.internals.DatabaseAdapter
import org.squeryl.adapters.{H2Adapter, MySQLAdapter, PostgreSqlAdapter}
import java.sql.Driver

trait DBType {
  def driver: Driver
  def adapter: DatabaseAdapter
}

object DBType {
  object MySql extends DBType {
    lazy val driver = Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance().asInstanceOf[Driver]
    lazy val adapter = new MySQLAdapter
  }

  object PostgreSql extends DBType {
    lazy val driver = Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver").newInstance().asInstanceOf[Driver]
    lazy val adapter = new PostgreSqlAdapter
  }

  object H2 extends DBType {
    lazy val driver = Class.forName("org.h2.Driver").newInstance().asInstanceOf[Driver]
    lazy val adapter = new H2Adapter
  }

  def fromUrl(url: String) = {
    url match {
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:mysql:") => Some(MySql)
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:postgresql:") => Some(PostgreSql)
      case u if u.startsWith("jdbc:h2:") => Some(H2)
      case _ => None
    }
  }
}

Answer 1

If you declare a sealed trait DBType, you can pattern match on it with exhaustiveness checking (ie, Scala will tell you if you forget one case).

Anyway, I dislike Scala's Enumeration, and I'm hardly alone in that. I never use it, and if there's something for which enumeration is really the cleanest solution, it is better to just write it in Java, using Java's enumeration.

Answer 2

For this particular case you don't really need classes for each database type; it's just data. Unless the real case is dramatically more complex, I would use a map and string parsing based solution to minimize the amount of code duplication:

case class DBRecord(url: String, driver: String, adapter: () => DatabaseAdapter) {}

class DBType(record: DBRecord) {
  lazy val driver = Class.forName(record.driver).newInstance().asInstanceOf[Driver]
  lazy val adapter = record.adapter()
}

object DBType {
  val knownDB = List(
    DBRecord("mysql", "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver", () => new MySQLAdapter),
    DBRecord("postgresql", "org.postgresql.Driver", () => new PostgreSqlAdapter),
    DBRecord("h2", "org.h2.Driver", () => new H2Adapter)
  )

  val urlLookup = knownDB.map(rec => rec.url -> rec).toMap

  def fromURL(url: String) = {
    val parts = url.split(':')
    if (parts.length < 3 || parts(0) != "jdbc") None
    else urlLookup.get(parts(1)).map(rec => new DBType(rec))
  }
}