I have a large tree-like data structure of objects which behave mostly identical but differ in one or two methods that calculate some keys used to navigate through the structure. The divergent behaviour depends on where the objects are in the structure.
I was starting out with an abstract base class and have several subclasses that implement each type of behaviour. This gives me around ten subtypes which are a) hard to name intelligently and b) look a little unwieldy in my project’s source folder, both because they are so similar.
I would prefer having a single factory class that doles out instances of anonymous subclasses on the fly. This would give me a lot of flexibility and open the door for a lot of nice improvements, such as sharing data and parametrizing stuff and would look a lot cleaner in my code structure. However, the whole thing is very sensitive to memory footprint and memory access time, and I’d have lots of these objects. Do I have to consider any disadvantages or pecularities of anonymous classes?
Like non-static inner classes, anonymous classes have a hidden reference to the class they’re defined in, which can cause problems if you use serialization and of course prevent objects of the outer class from being eligible for GC – but that’s unlikely to be a problem if you do it in a single factory class.