Re: Instantiate an abstract class

From:
Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.help
Date:
Wed, 06 Apr 2011 12:43:57 -0400
Message-ID:
<ini58c$8eh$2@news.albasani.net>
Rob McDonald wrote:

Joshua Cranmer wrote:

Rob McDonald wrote:

Now, we all know that you can't instantiate an abstract class -- but I
want to anyway... Actually, I would like my abstract class to be able
to instantiate another instance of whatever concrete class it is at
the time.


Your class is abstract, so you can easily have:

abstract class AFoo {
    public abstract AFoo makeInstance();


That worked great. I don't know why I hadn't come up with that
solution myself.

Most of my online searches had lead down the reflection path and I
quickly got myself wrapped around the axle. I'm going to go with the
above implementation, but I am curious about how it could be made to
work the other way.


Because you haven't yet read /Effective Java/ by Joshua Bloch. You must. We
all must, and not just once, either.

<http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/>
The very first item of which is,
"Item 1: Consider static factory methods instead of constructors"

--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
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