shared

Interface SharedObject

All Known Subinterfaces:

SharedObjectWithID

public interface SharedObject

Method Summary

Methods

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
SharedObject	duplicate() This method should ONLY be used by a SharedObjectFactory! Makes a clone of a prototype.
boolean	equivalent(SharedObject o) This method should ONLY be used by a SharedObjectFactory! Checks whether an object is really equivalent.
int	hashCode() This method is typically used by a SharedObjectFactory! Returns the hash code of an object.

Method Detail

duplicate

SharedObject duplicate()

This method should ONLY be used by a SharedObjectFactory! Makes a clone of a prototype. Just like Object.clone(), but it returns a SharedObject instead of an Object. Use this method to duplicate a Prototype object (an object that is allocated only once and gets updated with new information). Using the Prototype design pattern will lead to an efficient ObjectFactory that minimizes on object allocation time.

Returns:

An exact duplicate of the current object

equivalent

boolean equivalent(SharedObject o)

This method should ONLY be used by a SharedObjectFactory! Checks whether an object is really equivalent. The types should be equal, the fields should be equivalent too. So this is complete recursive equivalence.

Parameters:

o - The object to compare to

Returns:

true if the object is really equivalent, or false otherwise

hashCode

int hashCode()

This method is typically used by a SharedObjectFactory! Returns the hash code of an object. It is a good idea to compute this code once, and store it locally in a field to let this hashCode() method return it. Because a SharedObject should be immutable, the hashCode has to be computed only once. Note that a hashCode() of 0 should also lead to a correct implementation, but it will be very slow. A good uniform hash leads to the fastest implementations.

Overrides:

hashCode in class Object

Returns:

a proper hash code for this object