What is the fragile base class problem in java?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
A fragile base class is a common problem with inheritance, which applies to Java and any other language which supports inheritance.
In a nutshell, the base class is the class you are inheriting from, and it is often called fragile because changes to this class can have unexpected results in the classes that inherit from it.
There are few methods of mitigating this; but no straightforward method to entirely avoid it while still using inheritance. You can prevent other classes inheriting from a class by labelling the class declaration as
finalin Java.A best practice to avoid the worst of these problems is to label all classes as final unless you are specifically intending to inherit from them. For those to intend to inherit from, design them as if you were designing an API: hide all the implementation details; be strict about what you emit and careful about what you accept, and document the expected behaviour of the class in detail.