With this installment of Design Techniques, I begin a series of articles that will focus on the design of classes and objects. In this series I will discuss the following: designing classes for proper object initialization, finalization, and cleanup; designing fields and methods, in general; and designing class fields and methods, in particular. I won't address the design of class hierarchies in these first few installments -- rather, I will focus only on the design of individual classes.
Java and basic software design principles
In the first few installments of this column series, I plan to cover some basic object-oriented and structured design techniques as they apply to Java. Many of you undoubtedly are already familiar with these techniques, as they apply equally well to other languages. In my experience in the cubicle, however, I have encountered a lot of code written by programmers who, shall we say, could stand to take a refresher course on the basics. So I think it is important to cover the basics in the early articles of this column.
