Humor4u

Let's talk about laziness. No, let's not just talk about being lazy - let's do something about it. Let's be lazy. There's a common pattern that I use in Android programming where I will create objects lazily, especially when these objects will not necessarily or frequently be needed at runtime. This is especially true for code that I write for the Android framework, where we like to be as lean as possible and leave more memory available for the system and the application. Often, these objects are collections. My personal favorite is ArrayList (ever since I moved on years ago from the original, but somewhat crusty,  Vector class), although I am also known to use Hashmap for those key/value pair situations (especially after I got used to ActionScript's paradigm of everything-is-a-hashmap). Of course, you can't simply start poking into a lazily-created collection willy-nilly, unless you're a big fan of NullPointerExceptions. So you need to first check ...

This article is for API developers only. If you're writing an application, you may not care about APIs, because you probably don't have any. But if you're writing a library that others will use, public API comes into play. API is like a pile of laundry: you can either spread the huge, reeking mess out all over your floor, or you can stuff it into a nice, clean hamper. While the first approach provides the convenience of being able to select each day's pre-soiled attire quickly, since it is arrayed out in front of you when you get out of bed, the second solution presents a clean interface to people that make the mistake of walking into your pathetic, slovenly life. Good APIs prefer hampers. I was implementing a new piece of API and functionality and wondered the following: Is there any reason to not put my implementation (which I did not want in the public API, and which would be the only implementation of said interface) inside the interface itself? It seems odd, perhap...

Varargs, a feature of the C language since roughly the late Victorian era, was introduced into the Java language in JDK1.5. I love varargs. They allow me to declare a function flexibly with the ability to take zero, one, or several parameters. This ability is useful when the user may have an unpredictable number of things to add to some data structure, eliminating the need for them to create some collection to pass the parameters into your function. It makes for a nice API. And I'm all about nice API. (And donuts). But sometimes varargs don’t work so well. I suppose it’s because I expect too much of them. Like when you meet someone that you really like, so you call them every few minutes or so, then hang around outside their apartment and workplace and friends' houses until they get a restraining order on you. It’s not that they weren’t really cool and worth getting to know, but that your needs weren't necessarily compatible. I was working recently on some API improvements ...