Re: "How do you arrive at classes?"

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:


  Thank you all for your answers!

  I have written a German-language web page to answer
  the question. Here are some parts of it in English:

  1. direct, literal, straightforward answer

  You write several different class declarations,
  when you need to have objects of different types,
  and library classes do not fit all of them.

  2. remarks

  - There is not a unique ?best? solution

  - OOP is about objects, not about classes

  3. hints

  - prefer to reuse a standard library class or a library
    class instead of writing a new class declaration,
    or at least try composition with library classes

  - find fields (variables) that belong together and
    group them into one class, than add methods for them

  - investigate whether a class becomes more readable when
    split into multiple classes in a reasonable way.

  - try to isolate ?driver-like? behavior in
    separate classes (?isolate change?), e.g.,
    a JavaFX program is split into classes that
    only contain JavaFX-related stuff and classes
    that only contain JavaFX-unrelated stuff (model).

  - try to see if real objects of the problem domain
    can be used as objects in the program

  4. further hints

  - Read sources (books, articles) about OOA/OOD

  - use software design patterns (see the books)

  - apply software design rules (e.g.: ?KISS?)

  - With anonymous innner classes and method literals
    we do not need as many class declarations as in
    1995 in Java

http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/klassen_java