I am really sorry if I tricked you into believing that Java is offering partial class feature. Unfortunately, Java doesn’t. Maybe never will. But I am going to talk about a workaround also presenting the thought process. Hence the length of the post.

I am very particular about composing the content of the posts (and pages) on this blog. By content, I mean whatever goes in the body of a post/page – text, image, HTML, etc. I like to keep the content extremely clean and avoid polluting with HTML like I had to on Blogspot. With such content, it is a terrible pain to migrate blogs or render posts flawless and consistent across browsers. Blogger is notorious for that aspect¹.

It was about a decade ago when Visual Studio .NET 2002 was launched. Having worked with Visual Studio 6 until then, the new interface was refreshing and powerful along with .NET and the suite of languages, tools and technologies. If you were there, you would have felt times were changing. Beyond the cool and modern interface, Visual Studio .NET 2002 had a lot more to offer  compared to Visual Studio 6 — .NET. It was an exciting time for me back then.

What are your thoughts on the following piece of code?

public String someGibberishMethod() {
	int length = someMethodReturningLength();
	int sum = 0;

	for (int index = 0; index < length; ++index) {
	   // some code that updates the sum variable
	}

	SomeClass someClass = new SomeClass(sum);
	int sumValueInsideSomeClass = someClass.getSumValue();
	// use someText, maybe log or something

	String someText = someClass.doSomeOperation(/*some parameters*/);
	// use someText, maybe log or something
	return someText;
}

If you are writing a typical console based application in Windows, you would end up with an executable (exe). You might also have one or more dependent libraries (DLL). The question is where do we place these DLLs so that they are picked up at runtime by the application; loaded and consumed. Actually it is no brainer, just put them along side the console application executable. Or you could place the DLLs in the System32 directory. Or you could add the directory to the PATH. Well, my point was actually to say that the DLLs can be simply placed alongside the executable and it would be picked up.

It all began when I wanted to return more than one value from one of the methods. Although my attempts ended futile, it was fun exploring and musing how things could have been.

There are at least a couple of options to return multiple values from a method:-

1. return an instance of a class that holds the values
2. return a tuple

IoC - Inversion of control, is a design that enables fluid flow of control by decoupling tight dependencies between the portion of a code that exhibits behavior and another portion of code that provides required functionality. One form of IoC, as we know, is Dependency Injection (DI). For instance, a TextEditor could refer an ISpellChecker instead of direct coupling to a specific implementation of spell checker thereby enabling the text editor to switch spell checker or even use more than one.