On Sun, Feb 18, 2024 at 9:51 AM Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > There seem to have been a lot of needless deprecations of constructors > > and replacement with builder patterns. > > The use of the builder pattern avoids constructor inflation. For > example, we had fourteen (14) constructors for ZipFile, that's > confusing and cluttered, a builder is simpler IMO. > I don't find constructor inflation to be a problem when the constructors are obvious alternatives. Look at it from the perspective of a client of the API rather than an implementer of the API. I just type ZipFile z = new ZipFile(myFileObject); Done. This is simpler to remember, write, and read than ZipFile z = ZipFile.builder().setFile(myFileObject).build(); If that's even the variant of the builder pattern used here. Every builder is a little different. It might be ZipFile z = (new ZipFile.Builder()).setFile(myFileObject).build(); or perhaps ZipFile z = ZipFile.builder().withFile(myFileObject).build(); or even ZipFile z = ZipFile.builder().file(myFileObject).build(); There are others. Everyone understands constructors and knows what API to expect. Builders, not so much. Using constructors also avoids unexpected runtime exceptions like https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/IO/issues/IO-830 and https://issues.apache.org/jira/projects/IO/issues/IO-831. Example in this case ZipFile z = ZipFile.builder() .setFile(myFileObject) .setName("myFile.zip") .setPath(Paths.get("/tmp/anotherfile.zip")) build(); There isn't a constructor equivalent of this statement because you can't pass a file and a path and a name to one ZipFile constructor. With constructors, there's no bug and on runtime problems. Type checking verifies that the object has the necessary information for a new object at compile time. With builders you don't find out till runtime. Builders do have a place. In particular they are useful when: 1. There are multiple arguments of the same type that are easily confused. OR 2. Object initialization requires a lot of work that doesn't belong in a constructor, like reading a file. AND 3. All arguments not passed to the builder's own constructor are optional. AND 4. Any combination and permutation of setter methods is allowed. None of those apply to a straightforward class like ZipFile. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
