Re: [Cdk-devel] modules, core class and ICDKObject

[Rajarshi G. <raj...@gm...>]

On Oct 24, 2010, at 3:31 AM, Nina Jeliazkova wrote:
>
> AFAIK , Vector is still around for compatibility reasons , otherwise  
> one could have
>
> Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList())
>
> http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/collections/implementations/wrapper.html
>
>
> Without looking into code and without any particular use in mind, I  
> would have preference for collections implementing List<T>  
> interface, instead of extending ArrayList<T> class.  This will open  
> the door towards using classes from java.util.concurent package,  
> e.g. like this one
>
> http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/CopyOnWriteArrayList.html


I think this idea is good, but I'm a little confused. Say RingSet  
implemented List<T>, rather than extending ArrayList<T>. The RingSet  
class would then have to implement the as much of the List interface  
as needed - but the implementation may or may not be thread safe,  
synchronized etc. So for each type of List implementation, I'd have to  
reimplement RingSet

My motivation for this refactoring was that for the most part the *Set  
classes were just lists of objects (with a few helper methods in some  
cases). Thus, RingSet is a very slight specialization of List  
(ArrayList or any other implementation).

While making RingSet implement List is a nice generalization, I don't  
see how it helps us - I'd still have to implement the specific type of  
List myself (?) In other words, I'd have to have a traditional  
ArrayList based RingSet, a concurrent version of RingSet and so on.

So, why not just have multiple RingSet classes derived from the  
specific variants of List implementations:

RingArrayList
RingCopyOnWriteArrayList
...

The alaternative to all of this is to completely drop RingSet and just  
move methods that work on collections of Rings into a manipulator class

----------------------------------------------------
Rajarshi Guha        | NIH Chemical Genomics Center
http://www.rguha.net | http://ncgc.nih.gov
----------------------------------------------------
A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the  
conditions
that make it fail.
		-- Jerry Ogdin