Re: String Externalization
Jason Cavett wrote:
I know, generally, hard coding strings is not the best thing in the
world to do. However, if I am not planning on changing those strings
(especially if the application has already been written - and it's
big), is there any reason to incur the overhead (time to implement,
overhead of the use of Properties, etc) to convert an application so
it uses a .properties file.
If you can see in the future and therefor can be sure that
those strings will not be changed, then you are in a very
fortunate position.
:-)
Experience show that code tend to be used much longer than
original intended.
So let us say that there are very good reason to consider
externalizing those strings.
We live in a global world and it is not so unrealistic
to suddenly need to support other languages.
But note that there is a big difference in having
string literals spread out in all classes directly
in the method calls and having a few classes with
a bunch of final static strings.
With the last approach it is a lot easier to change
things than with the first approach.
Arne