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Subject: Re: Using internal classes with Digester and XMLRules
From: Simon Kitching <skitching@apache.org>
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Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 20:59:50 +1300
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On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 18:09 +0100, Thomas Dudziak wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Frank W. Zammetti <fzlists@omnytex.com> wrote:
> 
> > Anyone else, just out of curiosity, is there a "best practice" around
> > this?  My feeling is that if I'm configuring an object that is only used
> > by a given class, i.e., Class foo has a collection of Class bar's that
> > will be created via Digester, and nothing outside foo uses bar, and then
> > making bar an inner class makes it a bit more obvious to me what its
> > purpose is and how it fits into the object schema, so to speak... although
> > one could argue that it represents coupling and therefore is bad... any
> > thoughts?
> 
> You should use inner classes (non-static) only if they have a real
> tight coupling to the outer class, i.e. if they always need a outside
> instance (think: almost every method of the inner class would
> otherwise need an object of the outer class as parameter).
> Whether you prefer nested (static) classes or normal classes in the
> same package might depend on whether the nested class needs access to
> internals of the outer class (private methods) though one could argue
> that this is not a good design.
> 
> Other than that it is probably a matter of personal style. But I tend
> to avoid static classes for the sole reason that they make the class
> bigger and less readable.

Non-static inner classes are of course very useful as "adapters" which
implement some interface and map it onto methods of the enclosing class.
I generally find them nicer than anonymous classes, though anonymous
classes are appropriate in some cases.

I agree with you both on all the other points.

Cheers,

Simon


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