I have a large body of Java code that uses a class XXX. Over time, the meaning of the class has changed, and the name is no longer appropriate. To make the code more readable, I would like to change the name of the class to YYY.
One option is to edit all the files in a single pass and change XXX to YYY, but the actual name of the class is not unique — there are other classes with the same name, different package — so I need to look at code. I would like to be able to make some changes, test that it is correct, and change some more, test some more, etc. During this transition time, I want to be able to use YYY and XXX interchangeably. Eventually I would eliminate the XXX.
What I need is an “alias” concept, where I could make YYY and alias of XXX, but Java does not have this.
I could make YYY a subclass of XXX with all the same constructors and methods. That will work fine where a variable is declared XXX, and I assign a value of type YYY. It will also work where a method parameter is XXX, and I pass a YYY. But it will not work the other way around when the parameter is declared YYY and I have an XXX value to send.
I could inject YYY into the inheritance, so that XXX extends YYY, but I have the same problem as above: in code that has mixed use of XXX declarations and YYY values there is trouble.
The transition time will take a couple of months. During this time, I don’t care about performance or efficiency, I just need it to compile and run correctly enough to test. Any suggestions for a best practice to allow for incremental change of a class name in a body of Java code?
UPDATE
The answer below is that while there is no way to do this in Java, there also should be no reason to either. I followed up by installing and refactoring the code, and wrote up the experience in this blog post: Don’t Suffer Poor Names
Use an IDE such as Eclipse and use its refactoring tools to rename the class. This will automatically change it everywhere it’s used, update imports, etc.