Prefixed Naming

If you look at the source code of
Takes or
Cactoos for the first time,
you most probably, like many others, will be triggered by the naming
convention, which implies that most class names have two-letter prefixes:
BkSafe ,
RqFake ,
RsWithStatus ,
TkGzip ,
and so on. To be honest,
I haven’t seen a single Java developer who would be comfortable with this
convention at first sight. I have, however, seen many who are in love with it
now. This article is for those who are interested in moving from the
first category to the second one.

Buffalo'66 (1998) by Vincent Gallo Any software package, module, library, or framework of a decent size has
a large amount of classes. Well, it has to have .
If it doesn’t, there is definitely a problem with its design.
So there’s always a problem of how to name those classes. The easiest and most
obvious approach is the one used in Java and its flagship framework
Spring :
make class names as descriptive and as long as possible. Here are
some examples :

ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean
SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory
TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy
AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer

This is garbage, isn’t it?

A much more sophisticated and time-consuming way of naming classes is
by the DDD paradigm ,
which suggests using nouns after entities in the real world, like port, car,
book, story, user, socket, and so on. Identifying the right entities
is a big challenge for a software architect. A bad one would just resort
to ConnectionFactoryUtils or DefaultListableBeanFactory and call it a day.
A more professional one may spend hours or days, but will eventually come up with
something more domain-driven .

Let’s assume you are the latter and you managed to find the right nouns.
How many of them will be out there in your domain? A few dozen, I believe. Even
if the application is rather complex, you won’t have more than 30 entities
in its problem domain. However, as was mentioned above ,
the amount of
classes will be much larger, sometimes over a thousand or more. Thus, the
second problem you will face is how to name classes which are
“entities with specifiers.” For example, you have a port and also a random port
and a TCP port, and a port already closed, and a port not yet opened, and so on.

There will be nouns with adjectives : random port, closed port, opened port,
TCP port, broken port, and so on. How do you name those classes? Maybe, as simply
as this: RandomPort , OpenedPort , ClosedPort , TcpPort .
Maybe, but I think it’s better to turn the common Port part into a common prefix Pt
for all classes:...