Hi Steve,
On 06/15/2016 05:56 PM, Steve Drach wrote:
>Fields or methods is another discussion point for the base and runtime
versions.
My thinking is, in this case fields and methods are equivalent, the method not
giving any more flexibility than a field. For example the method
JarFile.baseVersion will just return the value contained in the private final
static field BASE_VERSION. Or the public final static field BASE_VERSION can
be directly accessed. I see no advantage of a method here. But I’m willing to
be enlightened.
If you make the static final field part of public API, then you
constrain yourself to initializing it in class initializer. If you keep
it private and expose it via a static method now, then you keep the
freedom to initialize it lazily if it ever happens to be needed in the
future because of various reasons such as initialization circularity.
But I don't know if this applies in your case. Would you ever need to
use part of JarFile class early in bootup sequence before those fields
can be initialized?
Regards, Peter
