The little things mean the most...

There is a programming pattern that I had never seen before.

That is, there are multiple constructors of a Java class that share a 'base' block of code that needs to be called for each of them.

Well, I try to minimize opportunities for bad typing.  So, when I came across a situation like this - I created a method called base() that would be called by each of the constructors.  That way, the code would exist in one place and would be easier to keep clean and up to date.

Good plan right?

It worked, but today I was playing with the idea of making my big giant app send Twitter updates to let me know what was going on and notify me as errors occured.  The java library that I stumbled onto was twitter4j by Yusuke Yamamoto.

I wanted to make sure that if I tried to send a large (more than 140 character) tweet - it would be handled gracefully rather than getting truncated.  At first glance, they would have gotten truncated.  I'll have to check further to see if this is true.

But, my base() trick is not as clever as I thought.

There was a better way, that I never saw before today.  And that is to use the regular zero parameter constructor by calling it from each of the other constructors as this().  Clean and beautiful - thanks Yusuke.

To myself I say...

Duh.