Advantages of Java’s enum over the old “Typesafe Enum” pattern?

by
  • “cannot be subclassed” isn’t a restriction. It’s one of the big advantages: It ensures there there is always only ever exactly the set of values defined in the enum and no more!
  • enum correctly handles serialization. You can do that with type-safe enums as well, but it’s often forgotten (or simply not known). This ensures that e1.equals(e2) always implies e1 == e2 for any two enum values e1 and e2 (and vice versa, which is probably more important).
  • There are specific lightweight data structures that handle enums: EnumSet and EnumMap (stolen from this answer)

More Related Contents:

  1. Implementing Singleton with an Enum (in Java)
  2. How to get an enum value from a string value in Java
  3. Why are arrays covariant but generics are invariant?
  4. Singletons vs. Application Context in Android?
  5. Design Patterns: Factory vs Factory method vs Abstract Factory
  6. Why do we need break after case statements?
  7. Long list of if statements in Java
  8. Map enum in JPA with fixed values?
  9. Use Cases and Examples of GoF Decorator Pattern for IO
  10. How can I lookup a Java enum from its String value?
  11. Builder Pattern in Effective Java
  12. Coding Conventions – Naming Enums
  13. Enum in Java. Advantages?
  14. Getting enum associated with int value
  15. What’s the best way to implement `next` and `previous` on an enum type?
  16. Is it bad practice to make a setter return “this”?
  17. Other Ways of Singleton in Java [duplicate]
  18. Open Session In View Pattern
  19. In simplest terms, what is a factory?
  20. Use Enum type as a value parameter for @RolesAllowed-Annotation
  21. Why does every object in Java implicitly extend java.lang.Object class?
  22. How thread-safe is enum in java?
  23. Is This Use of the “instanceof” Operator Considered Bad Design?
  24. Java generic methods in generics classes
  25. Java Enums and Switch Statements – the default case?
  26. Lambdas in the classical Operation enum example
  27. Does the Bridge Pattern decouples an abstraction from implementation?
  28. Java using enum with switch statement
  29. Why Java does not allow overriding equals(Object) in an Enum?
  30. Java Enum getDeclaringClass vs getClass

Leave a Comment