Description Vladimir Piskarev 2018-10-27 11:06:59 EDT

Currently, clients can create a new instance of the class EditorUtility or use the shared  instance called DEFAULT, which is a public static final field in EditorUtility. The problem with the DEFAULT field is that the EditorUtility is not a final class and may be subclassed by clients.

For example, we could create a Java-specific extension:

public class JavaEditorUtility extends EditorUtility {
    public static final EditorUtility INSTANCE = new JavaEditorUtility();
...
}

In this case, the class JavaEditorUtility would expose two public static final fields INSTANCE and DEFAULT of the type EditorUtility, which could be confusing for clients:

JavaEditorUtility.INSTANCE // an instance of JavaEditorUtility
JavaEditorUtility.DEFAULT  // NOT an instance of JavaEditorUtility

A better alternative might be to introduce a separate class, DefaultEditorUtility, which would provide the default instance of the editor utility, and to remove the DEFAULT field from the EditorUtility. Note that this is a breaking change.