What is a good use case for static import of methods?

by

This is from Sun’s guide when they released the feature (emphasis in original):

So when should you use static import? Very sparingly! Only use it when you’d otherwise be tempted to declare local copies of constants, or to abuse inheritance (the Constant Interface Antipattern). … If you overuse the static import feature, it can make your program unreadable and unmaintainable, polluting its namespace with all the static members you import. Readers of your code (including you, a few months after you wrote it) will not know which class a static member comes from. Importing all of the static members from a class can be particularly harmful to readability; if you need only one or two members, import them individually.

(https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/language/static-import.html)

There are two parts I want to call out specifically:

  • Use static imports only when you were tempted to “abuse inheritance”. In this case, would you have been tempted to have BusinessObject extend some.package.DA? If so, static imports may be a cleaner way of handling this. If you never would have dreamed of extending some.package.DA, then this is probably a poor use of static imports. Don’t use it just to save a few characters when typing.
  • Import individual members. Say import static some.package.DA.save instead of DA.*. That will make it much easier to find where this imported method is coming from.

Personally, I have used this language feature very rarely, and almost always only with constants or enums, never with methods. The trade-off, for me, is almost never worth it.

More Related Contents:

  1. What does the “static” modifier after “import” mean?
  2. Specific String validation using regex
  3. How to connect with Web Api Spotify (in Java)?
  4. Polymorphism vs Overriding vs Overloading
  5. How to supply value to an annotation from a Constant java
  6. Common elements in two lists
  7. Left padding a String with Zeros [duplicate]
  8. What is this: [Ljava.lang.Object;?
  9. Make Maven to copy dependencies into target/lib
  10. Can someone explain mappedBy in JPA and Hibernate?
  11. Is there an upper bound to BigInteger? [duplicate]
  12. How is values() implemented for Java 6 enums?
  13. How to cast an Object to an int
  14. How to make canvas with Swing?
  15. How to change size of title’s text on Action Bar?
  16. How to implement pagination in Spring MVC 3 [closed]
  17. Http POST in BlackBerry
  18. Transparent JButton
  19. How to perform Basic Authentication for FirefoxDriver, ChromeDriver and IEdriver in Selenium WebDriver?
  20. How to get a Stream from a float[]
  21. Easy way of populating Javabeans based on request parameters
  22. java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Dangling meta character ‘+’ near index 0 +
  23. Are Activity/Fragment Transitions compatible with pre-Lollipop devices?
  24. What GC parameters is a JVM running with?
  25. List .zip directories without extracting
  26. ClassNotFoundException Android
  27. How to combine 3 or more CompletionStages?
  28. Spring @JsonIgnore not working
  29. Retrofit GSON serialize Date from json string into java.util.date
  30. Explanation of HashMap#hash(int) method

Leave a Comment