Re: Enum mixin?
Robert Klemme wrote:
markspace wrote:
Robert Klemme wrote:
A. W. Dunstan wrote:
I'm ok with leaving it the way it is, but does anyone know of a better
approach? Preferably one that's not so complex that it's worse than my
current state of affairs?
Your current state of affairs is not that bad. The problem is your prejudi=
ce against copy-and-paste. There is no technical solution for that; you ju=
st have to get over it.
I don't think it gets any better. Even if you go away from enums and
create an abstract base class etc. you'll have to do the typing for the
values plus you need to take care of serialization etc.
I would have thought that an abstract base class would get you what you
need. Maybe I'm overlooking something. The second class here seems to
remove a lot of boilerplate, esp considering my IDE will write the
constructor for me (since it's the only one available).
Well, for Al's original code you would also benefit from some IDE
boilerplate generation. Plus, if you rename the int property according=
to sub class then you gain even less.
+1.
I generally put a "human-friendly" string representation of an enum constan=
t into it:
FOO("foo"),
BIG_EFFORT("big effort"),
The code to write a static 'fromString()' and override the 'toString()' is =
boilerplate. I set all my IDEs to produce that boilerplate for me when I a=
sk for a new enum.
package quicktest;
import java.io.Serializable;
public abstract class AbstactEnum implements Serializable {
For serialization to work like with enum (i.e. always only those
instances in memory that you define in the class) you need to do
considerably more. That effectively will be a reimplementation of enum.=
Plus, it can be tricky to get concurrency right etc. And you have the=
drawback that you need to do it yourself.
Oh, the price of not studying /Effective Java/, by Joshua Bloch (2nd ed.) (=
EJ)!
'Serializable' is one of the most heavily abused Java features. Besides th=
e tremendous amount of work it takes to actually get it right, contrary to =
its apparent simplicity, you are creating a permanent public interface into=
the private elements of the class, as EJ points out. You really lose flex=
ibility to refactor the implementation if you commit to a serialization for=
mat.
...
final class CloudModel extends AbstactEnum {
...
}
I find that not really much less typing than the original code. Plus,
it's not an enum which means you lose the immediate information which
for example IDE's provide when showing an icon for the type of language=
element.
There are some major drawbacks to creating a type-safe enumeration pre-Java=
5 style compared to enums. I can conceive of rare use cases for it, thoug=
h.
Using type-safe enumerations requires the programmer to be responsible for =
all those messy details, though, as you so aptly point out.
--
Lew