Question

While answering a few questions on here earlier and from some work I have been doing lately I have been wondering why Java does not support method chaining on its built in classes.

If I were to create a Car class for example, I could make it chainable by reutrning this instead of void as follows:

public class Car {
    private String make;        

    public Car setMake(String make) {
        this.make = make;
        return this;
    }   
}

Is there any particular reason why the built in libraries don’t tend to do things this way? Is there a downside to method chaining?

I may have overlooked something which would explain the lack of method chaining however any setter method that returns void by default should return a reference to this (at least in my eyes it should). This would make situations like the following much cleaner.

container.add((new JLabel("label text")).setMaximumSize(new Dimension(100,200)));

rather than the more long winded: Note: It would not stop you from coding this way if you wished.

JLabel label = new JLabel("label text");
label.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(100,200));
container.add(label);

I would be very interested to hear the reasons behind this decision, If I had to guess it would be that there is an overhead associated with this and so should only be used when needed.

Answer 1

Eh. There’s readability arguments to be made in both directions — there’s such a thing as trying to put too much into a single line.

But honestly, I suspect here it’s for historical reasons: pervasive “chaining” behavior hadn’t really become popular or well-known when e.g. Swing was being developed. You could argue that it should’ve been added in later on, but things like that tend to create binary incompatibilities and other issues that Sun/Oracle have historically been extremely cautious about.

More recent JDK libraries — see e.g. ByteBuffer for a major, well-known example — have provided chaining behavior and the like, where it makes sense.