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Ryan Bowlen
Ryan Bowlen

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TIL — Static Factory Methods

Today my work tasks led me to read about static factory methods, which are a different approach to initializing Java classes.

A bottling factory

Effective Java (Addison-Wesley 2018) helped me understand this concept, and here is my brief take on that reading:
Bottles moving through an actual factory.Bottles moving through an actual factory.

-Static factory methods are given names, which helps us as developers better and more quickly understand what they do.
-They save time and memory in your program, because they aren’t required to create new instances when they are run.
-They can create subtypes that differ from release to release. These subtypes don’t even have to have their class written at the time that the method is written.
-They certainly don’t solve every problem. They don’t scale well with growing parameters. But the example given in the book illustrates this concepts use:

public static Boolean valueOf(boolean b) {
       return b ? Boolean.TRUE : Boolean.FALSE;
}
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Here you dynamically return an initialized boolean with concise and easy-to-understand code. That is just simply worth it.
Cheers.

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Andy Delso

I've been reading this book as well and it's been eye opening for sure.