Project Structure

Hi Everyone,
All this forum is about, is code structure.
How do you plan your plugin? What sections do you separate classes into?
I continually find myself creating empty packages, or classes that can't reference other classes they are dependent on...
Any discussion of this topic is welcome!

 

When I start a plugin, I normally do these few things (if it's a fairly large plugin):
[1] List all of the features/commands/permissions which the plugin will have and do
[2] List all of the classes which will carry out what action
[3] Write pseudo (fake) code for all of the complicated methods.

 

FlareLine
I tend to have the "Main" class inside its' own package then everything else I put into its own folder inside the mains' package. For example, all the event handler would go in a "handlers" folder and all extraneous methods go into a "methods" folder and, well I think you get the point

 

I see. How do you organize your references?
Do you create a constructor in every class and reference back to instances of others, or do you simply instantiate them again?

 

In terms of planning, I write a lot of the methods I'll need regularly into an API before I create event listeners, commands, etc. I take quite a lot of time over this because I don't want to have to go back and re-write most of it later on because I hadn't accounted for certain things. I've made that mistake before..

Usually my main package only contains the main class. I then put classes that do similar things into groups, like this:
http://gyazo.com/01b5fd36f1b4cc708a81fb59b16474e5

I create a new class for every command, event listener custom inventory, timer, etc
Sometimes I even have sub-packages in my API if I've got a load of related classes, like this:
http://gyazo.com/52e3c24da0302b8355174fd8e074c97f

 

FlareLine
It depends really.. If it's a class that has other useful methods inside, I will generally instance it but, if it's just a one time method call, i'll just create a new instance there and then..

 

lukewizzy This is very helpful to me. I never previously thought to throw all my utilities into an API package. Cheers!

 

You're welcome

Also it's not a major thing but I forgot to mention it, I generally have a config data file with variables from the config in a class (set in the onEnable) so I don't have to keep referencing the config directly
And sometimes I'll make a class that just holds itemstacks so they're all in the same place if I want to change them, so if I use the same item in multiple places or can't find it quickly then I can easily edit it