Hello everyone,


I have always seen some methods are described as "best practice". I am wondering what means "best practice", an algorithm?


Thanks in advance,
George

Can you post an exaple of where "best practice" is used?

Thanks OurNation,


There are many examples. For example, you can search "best practice" in http://java.sun.com, and you can find many of them.


regards,
George

Probably whatever is the most efficent...Like if you have a small program that could be accomplished with an iterative loop, it would NOT be good practice to use recursion.

Anyone know of some simple best practice lists somewhere? Searching the sun link above is a bit blinding.

Here is a simple issue which new Java programmers meet quite quickly...

If I write a class that will be instantiated ONLY once is it best practice to put most of the initialisation code in the initialiser block or in the constructor?

In many cases there is loads of code that would work in either position because it is pre-configuring instance variables before they are used or displayed.

For trivial classes this doesn't make much difference but as classes grow it gets more important to have a clear structure or sequence for the initialisation code.

This ref covers some useful basic stuff on layout.

http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/CodeConventions.pdf

Umfortunately it doesn't extend to my initialisation code issue et al.

Anyone have a link to something that takes it a bit further?

If the class only needs to be instantiated once, does it need to be instantiated at all? Why not use static methods? My personal preference is to avoid adding object-orientation that doesn't have to be there - it makes everything seem cleaner, somehow. This also takes care of the constructor vs init method issue - if there's no instantiation, there's no constructor.

Just a thought.

Static methods are not OO, and therefore not recommended by good OO approaches (which are best practice).

That's not to say they don't have their uses, but in strict OO design you will not find them.
At most some singletons and methods which have no instance specific functionality may be turned into static methods at some point if such yields superior performance.

Of course in reality that's often factored into the design as people get experienced enough to make such decisions at an early stage, but it's only the absolute beginners who make everything static, effectively abandoning OO altogether.

Thanks. Looks like it's the constructor. I understand that design patterns also indicate this although I'm unsure how to check that one out.

Buy yourself "Head First Design Patterns" by Eric and Elisabeth Freeman (0596007124).

It's an excellent book that explains not just the patterns but why and how to use them.
I knew the basic idea before reading that book and could recognise them, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to apply that knowledge consistently.