Question

This is language agnostic, but I’m working with Java currently.

I have a class Odp that does stuff. It has two private helper methods, one of which determines the max value in an int[][], and the other returns the occurrences of a character in a String.

These aren’t directly related to the task at hand, and seem like they could be reused in future projects. Where is the best place to put this code?

1. Make it public — bad, because Odp’s functionality is not directly related, and these private methods are an implementation detail that don’t need to be in the public interface.

2. Move them to a different class — but what would this class be called? MiscFunctionsWithNoOtherHome? There’s no unifying theme to them.

3. Leave it private and copy/paste into other classes if necessary — BAD

What else could I do?

Answer 1

Here’s one solution:

Move the method that determines te max value in a two-dimensional int array to a public class called IntUtils and put the class to a util package.

Put the method that returns the occurrences of a character in a String to a puclic class called StringUtils and put the class to a util package.

There’s nothing particularly bad about writing static helper classes in Java. But make sure that you don’t reinvent the wheel; the methods that you just described might already be in some OS library, like Jakarta Commons.