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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T03:31:08+00:00

I am about to develop a peer to peer file sharing application in Java

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I am about to develop a peer to peer file sharing application in Java for a school project and was thinking over its design. I am stuck with two alternatives :

1)

A Peer class which holds all the state information like, its ID, its preferred neighbors, number of pieces etc.

and

A PeerManager class which acts as an interface for the Peer class. It will contain a reference to Peer object, and then methods operating over it. Some of the methods are updatePreferredNeighbours, connect or disconnect to another peer, generateLogs etc.

But when I think about it in terms of OO design, I feel that a Peer object should be responsible for its behaviour. That brings me to the second alternative:

2)

A Peer interface containing all the methods like connect to other peers, update neighbors etc (that were previously in peerManager)

and a Implementation of this interface say PeerImpl , which contains all the state information and also implements all the methods in the interface.

But my problem with this approach is that, it will clutter up the Impl class. The state consists of a lot of information and then I need to have their getters and setters so that other threads can update the state. In addition if I also have to implement all the methods of the interface, it will make the implementing class huge and very difficult to maintain or even debug.

Is there another way to approach this problem, any suggestions? Or which one of the two should I choose?

PS: I cannot give all the requirements of the project here as it will make the post too big, but what I have described is more or less the essence of the project.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Without know the details of your problem, it’s hard to be specific. However, if you look at the Peer class in terms of data modeling, it seems that there are (at least) two categories of data: things like ID that are properties of a Peer object and things like preferred neighbors that are relational properties between Peers. I’d give some thought into separating these into separate object classes.

    Regarding the complexity problem of the second approach: wouldn’t the same problem would exist regarding the PeerManager class of the first approach? It seems to me like this is an issue either way and doesn’t weigh in favor of one or the other approach.

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