On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Stefan Seelmann <seelm...@apache.org> wrote: > Emmanuel Lecharny schrieb: >> Hi, >> >> we have many objects that we want to be immutable. What's the best solution >> to produce those immutable objets ? >> >> - For DN, we would like to use valueOf(), and the DN() constructor, but no >> setter >> - For Entry, a constructor is not enough, as we may have to inject new >> attributes. We may need to have two different classes, one immutable, one >> mutable. The immutable class could be associated with a factory, or we can >> use a constructor with the list of attributes as a parameter. >> - For attributes, we have the same problem : we may have more than one >> value. >> >> DO any of you guys have a strong opinion ? > > Entry and Attribute object created by the user of the API shouldn't be > immutable. As user of the API I want to create an Entry object and add > attribute and values to it. So the API must provide setters. > > So I think if Entry and Attribute are interfaces we just define the > getter methods. > > The default implementations of those classes (e.g. ClientEntry and > ClientAttribute) additional have setters the user can use when > constructing the objects. > > The Entry objects returned from the API (e.g. from a search) should be > immutable to protect them from being casted by the user, e.g. by > wrapping a created ClientEntry into an ImmutableEntry implementation. >
I agree with Stefan. -- Alex Karasulu My Blog :: http://www.jroller.com/akarasulu/ Apache Directory Server :: http://directory.apache.org Apache MINA :: http://mina.apache.org
