API Design Flaw - Utility Garbage Cans

Friday, July 10. 2009

API Design Flaw - Utility Garbage Cans

Almost every application I have built in my career has had a "utility" class or package. This utility package contains small methods that are used from different components inside the application. Often utility methods are so small that they are just gathered inside the same utility class as static methods.

Indeed I've seen that kind of "utility classes" in every project I worked on or which I got chance looking into the source code. The class name usually ends with "Util", for example, DateUtil, StringUtil or simply CommonUtil.

Such utility libraries have a tendency to end up as "garbage cans" of all kinds of unrelated utility methods. As the utility library grows, your applications each tends to only use a small percentage of the total utility methods.

Don't forget that as soon as any one of those small method is called, the whole class will be loaded into memory.

Posted by Steven Yong in computer at 23:59 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thanks for the info sifu... Didn't realized that...

Oh god... I got source code which is few thousand lines just in 1 class.... cham...

#1 Gary (Homepage) on 2009-07-17 01:55 (Reply)

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