keith chapman wrote: > > In my view this is highly inefficient, especially if you have > plenty of > > services in the system. Wouldn't it be better to fix the API and > return > > a Map instead of a HashMap? If we did that we could simple return > > allServices instead of returning a copy of it. > > You don't want to return an actual reference to a mutable object > that backs a > significant data model - otherwise people could just get that Map and > (mistakenly or maliciously) randomly add and delete services. > > Agreed. But now that we've been doing it people may have code that > expect it to be there. So we need a mechanism for returning this map.
Um - we aren't currently returning the actual Map, we're returning a clone of it (just done manually instead of using clone()). You had suggested returning the actual Map itself, which is what I was reacting to above. I'm not saying the API should go away. <rant> Of course, if we had any kind of reasonable JavaDoc, there would be a clear indication in the API docs that the returned HashMap was in fact a clone and that inserting or removing things from it would have no effect on the system. </rant> Thanks, --Glen
