Mark R. Diggory wrote:
David Graham wrote:
I see no correlation between AOP and static methods, nor any correlation between static methods an increased code maintainability. There is nothing magic about static methods that make them more maintainable than non-statics.The discussion is growing somewhat repetative, OT and monotonic, unless anyone has a clearly differing view than whats been already voiced, I suggest we move on to more interesting development related topics, your probibly welcome to continue this discussion on the jakarta commons users/interest list.
David
http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/
-Rob
Cheers,
I agree that this could go on and on and we should get back to work, but I think that David's main point -- that static methods limit flexibility and are not really necessary to support utility functionality -- is a good one and one which we should keep in mind. The limitation on overriding is a serious concern and that is why in an earlier post, I suggested that we never use static methods for complex algorithms. An argument could be made that it would have been better to implement the methods in StatUtils as instance methods and to provide a (singleton) instance factory for users. I think that this is a better general approach, but for the simple computational methods in StatUtils and MathUtils, convenience and efficiency outweigh the extensibility concern.
Phil
True, there is a balance that needs to be maintained between extensibility and efficiency/ease of use. David's comments about lack of extensibility in static methods is valuable. But, I certainly don't believe that static usage or instantiable objects are either right or wrong. They both have their place. I believe we based the design of the static utilities on the current Math design for consistency (not only in static aspects, but return value domain and behavior).
I keep reminding myself, we are the developers, there is always room for refactoring in the future. If there becomes a clear hindrance with the use of static methods, then we can refactor them into a class that needs to be instantiated. This is not too difficult to accomplish.
-- Mark Diggory Software Developer Harvard MIT Data Center http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu
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