Question

Usually, during software development, there are all sorts of utility functions I need. Like zipped file, extract zip file, launching Web Browser, get scaled image…

What I did is, I place all this utility functions as static function within a single class named “Utils”

https://github.com/yccheok/jstock/blob/master/src/org/yccheok/jstock/gui/Utils.java

Is it a good practice? Will things grow unmanageable when the number of functions grow larger and larger?

Answer 1

Its absolutely a best practice! you don’t want to mix all those utility functions with the rest of your application business logic. However, as your utils files and/or classes grow it is recommended to group them according to the function they provide.

For example, in a web application you could end up with a package structure like this.

org.sample.web.model
org.sample.web.utils
org.sample.web.validators
org.sample.web.validators.utils