Learning from experience

Since my last post I have had several occasions of using my NullObjectProxy class in practice. I learned a lot from that. The first thing I realized was that I needed to allow defining behavior for the Object class methods (hashCode, equals, toString). Used in the confined environment of unit tests this was not obvious but used in real code it really became evident that this was needed. In fact I decided that I needed to provide a default coherent behavior for those methods.
I also realized that I needed to provide a more sophisticated method of defining return value even for a Null object.
The result of all this was that I modified my initial code quite a bit. So in my next post I am going to start over on the NullObjectProxy and used the updated more sophisticated version of this class.