Hiding classes in a jar file

Is it really impossible to hide some classes in a jar file?

I wanted not to allow direct instantiation of the classes to keep it more flexible. Only the factory (or a facade) should be visible of this jar.

Is there any other way than solve this problem than creating two projects?开发者_如何学Go (Two projects: the first one contains the classes (implementation) and the other one references to the first one and contains the factory; later only the second one will be referenced)

I'm understanding you're not looking to hide the actual classes, just prevent their construction outside a factory class. This I think can be quite easily achieved by using package private (default) visibility in the class constructors. The only limitation is that you'll need to have the classes and the factory in the same package so in a medium to large codebase things may get unnecessarily complex.

If I understand your question correctly, you would like to make sure that users of your library are forced to use your factory to instantiate their objects rather than using the constructors themselves.

As I see it there are two possibilities, one of which is silly but usable in few, specific cases, and the other one is the most practical and probably most commonly used way of doing it.

1. You could make all your classes into private inner classes of the factory. This would work if you had one factory per class, but is hardly workable if you have a lot of different classes being managed through one factory.
2. You could use the protected access modifier to restrict access to your class constructors. This is common practice when using the factory pattern.

I think you will have either compiler failure or warning if your public factory method try to return something which is "hidden".

No, you can not hide a public class without reimplementing your own ClassLoader or using OSGi or anything similar.

What you can do is to separate interface api from the implementation, e.g. have one project which contains only the interfaces and another porject which contains the implmentations. However, you still cannot hide the implementation classes.

Obfuscation can help you somehow.

With standard classloaders and plain old jar files, this is not possible. OSGi has this concept of making visible only some packages to another bundle(i.e. separation of public api and internal implementation).

If you are using eclipse, you may enforce such rules with this

If I understand you correctly when you say "not to allow direct instantiation of the classes to keep it more flexible", a properly executed facade pattern will handle this.

Restrict the constructors of all the classes you want to hide to package scope. Open the facade class to public scope.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/packagescope.html

"If you have a variable or method in your class that you don’t want clients of your class directly accessing, don’t give it a public, protected or private declaration. Due to an oversight in the design of Java, you can’t explicitly declare the default “package” accessibility. Other members of the package will be able to see it, but classes outside the package that inherit from yours, won’t. The protected accessibility attribute offers slightly more visibibily. A protected method is visible to inheriting classes, even not part of the same package. A package scope (default) method is not. That is the only difference between protected and package scope. "

There are two solutions to your question that don't involve keeping all classes in the same package.

The first is to use the Friend Accessor/Friend Package pattern described in (Practical API Design, Tulach 2008).

The second is to use OSGi. There is an article here explaining how OSGi accomplishes this.

Related Questions: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

You can do such magics with a custom class loader but:

• the correct separation will be available only in a project staffed with your class loader;
• it's really doubtful that the effort to create such loader is worthy.

In such situations I would do something similar to what we may see in the standard Java. E.g.you see javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory but somewhere you have com.sun.xml.internal.stream.XMLInputFactoryImpl. It is perfectly compilable if you write:

new com.sun.xml.internal.stream.XMLInputFactoryImpl()

though you will hardly do it :-) With a system property you may control the actual implementation that is being loaded. To me such approach is fine in many situations.

I hope I have understood your question correctly ;)

Cheers!