Java: creating a specific class

Question

I have a class constructed like that:

public class Creature
{
    protected final AI ai;
    // ...about 10 other objects

    public Creature (CreatureType type, int x, int y)
    {
        ai = new AI ();
        // some other code
    }

    // ... many methods
}

My class AI will be an artificial intelligence of the creature. I would like it to have full access to the Creature object as if it was inside. How could I achieve that? By some tricky way to inherit it?

You could put it in the same package and make it package local. I don't think using inheritance is a good idea. I would learn to love adding something like c. at the start to show it is the creature. — Peter Lawrey
– Peter Lawrey, Commented May 17, 2014 at 18:05
You mean accessing those fields in such a way: creature.field all the time? creature would be a reference to the object that called the AI class. But it's... ugly... — user3572544
– user3572544, Commented May 17, 2014 at 18:14
Maybe but it is simple and it works. It say I am referring to another object and it is a creature. — Peter Lawrey
– Peter Lawrey, Commented May 17, 2014 at 18:15
Yes, you are right, but my class AI will handle many operations for lots of creatures, so there would have been hundreads of creature. calls. — user3572544
– user3572544, Commented May 17, 2014 at 18:16

Chad · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-17 18:15:00Z

1

Making AI an inner class of Creature would give AI access to Creature's instance variables.

See: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/nested.html

answered May 17, 2014 at 18:15

Chad

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Nir Alfasi · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-17 18:55:05Z

You can do it in a few ways:

Inclusion: which is what you did, only that you should pass local variables and class variables to AI methods (separation of concerns etc). That's also my favorite approach.
Inheritance: makes sense to do only if there's a relation between the classes
Inner class: makes sense if AI is relevant only to Creature and doesn't have to interact with other classes directly
put the classes in the same package and set the relevant access modifiers to be package-private

An improvement to the first approach will be to use DI (dependency injection) and pass an AI object to the constructor instead of initializing the object (using new) in it.

I see that you added in the comments: "my class AI will handle many operations for lots of creatures". In order not to end up with a huge AI class that'll be tightly coupled with many creatures, I would create an AI interface and an AIService which will expose an interface with the supported operations. This service will be responsible to call the right AI implementation (per Creature type) to handle the operations.

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