Best practices question

[mchammer11]

Hi, I just completed a change with new functionality, with a utility class doing most of the gruntwork... and I was wondering which was the better practice... Creating an object of the class, and in the constructor calling the various utility methods, or creating an object, and using that object to call the various methods...Examples shown below (Currently I am using the first way shown)

//calling class
ClassA obj = new ClassA();

//utility class
public ClassA() {
     method1();
     method2();
     method3();
}

Ex 2:

//calling class
ClassA obj = new ClassA();
obj.method1();
obj.method2();
obj.method3();

[PhHein]

It depends. If you will always have to execute all three methods in the same order and use the created reference again, that's fine.

[iluxa]

In general, it's not a very good practice to stick complex logic into a constructor... whoever uses your class expects the constructor to create the object and thats it. So I'd prefer

ClassA obj = new ClassA();
obj.method1();
obj.method2();
obj.method3();

or otherwise, if all three methods always execute together and in that order,

ClassA obj = new ClassA();
obj.doTheWork();

class ClassA {
  public void doTheWork() {
    method1();
    method2();
    method3();
  }
}

You're saying class is utility. Is it stateless? If so, consider making the methods static, so you won't have to create instances of that class at all (like java.lang.Math, for example).