Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

There are many areas of Java which are considered "evil" - static methods, as an example. In general terms, I do agree with the idea of avoiding such mechanism ("import static" anyone?) even going so far as to try to avoid singletons as much as possible.

However, I do wish to make a case for when using such things is not necessarily a bad thing. I lean towards the idea that such things are not inherently bad in isolated environments, where not even threading is something that needs to be considered. A good example of this is JUnit tests. They are isolated, self-contained, single-threaded little programs where readability is typically vastly more important than "correctness" of code.

We clearly see this in the way NetBeans makes use of JUnit 4 - by default the line "import static org.junit.Assert.*;" is in your newly generated source file. What this facilitates is that the actual test class no longer needs to extend "TestCase" (as was necessary under JUnit 3), but on a readability level, we will code "assertXXX" instead of "Assert.assertXXX".

Sometimes, "evil" really is necessary ...