Chuck Norris

From APIDesign

Everyone who knows Chuck Norris knows that he can do magical things. During our Linz 2010 NetBeans Certified Training Toni Epple came up with new, yet unknown, Chuck's capability. Chuck can instantiate abstract classes!

I was just talking about one NetBeans API - Nodes and I had to explain why certain NetBeans classes are improperly named. Like AbstractNode. In spite of its name it is class that can be instantiated (althrough it is usually subclassed in order to be useful). Well, yeah, it does not have Good Name. A name like DefaultNode would suite that class more.

At least this is the convention used by Swing. There is an interface and then there is a default implementation that simplifies the interface usage in Swing. We could have followed this naming practise, if the Nodes API creation had not preceeded Swing by few months. Then it was too late to change the name (as we would break backward compatibility) and not gained much. Rather we learned to live with AbstractNode's name.

The upside of this case is that each developer using NetBeans API can feel like Chuck Norris for a moment! Everyone can instantiate abstract node!. Enjoy this magnificent power and please don't misplace Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee: