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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:08:24+00:00

I’ve been thinking of ways of providing syntactic sugar for a framework I have

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I’ve been thinking of ways of providing syntactic sugar for a framework I have been working on. I want to deal with Immitable objects exclusively.

Say I have an immutable object and wish to create a modified version of it. Would, in your view, a non-instantiable class with a single static factory method break OO principles ?

As an example using a String:

public final class LOWERCASE {        private LOWERCASE() {}        public static String string( final String STRING ) {           return STRING.toLowerCase();     } }

Therefore from this example I could write:

String lowercaseString = LOWERCASE.string( targetString );

Which I find very readable.

Any provisos against such an approach?

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  1. I don’t think it’s a good idea to create one class per method. You could instead create a static only methods class, named e.g StringUtils and implement the methods. This way you would call:

    String lowerCaseString = StringUtils.lowercase( targetString );

    This would also offer you intellisense help while you are typing. The list of your classes will go otherwise too big. Even for this simple example, you should implement more than one Lowercase classes, so that you could also cater for circumstances that the CulutureInfo must be taken into consideration.

    I don’t think this breaks OO principles in any way or that is bad design. In other languages, Ruby for example, you could add your methods directly to String class. Methods that end with ! denote that the original object is modified. All other methods return a modified copy. Ruby on Rails framework adds some methods to the String class and there is some debate about whether this is a good technique or not. It is definitely handy though.

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