Comments on: Recursive Trees

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:08:56 +0000

On second thoughts, it doesn’t look quite so awesome. I was thinking it would be a replacement for boilerplate NullXXX classes. It does make it clear that the method may return null, but I still don’t like the unboxing into the “real” object.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:49:46 +0000

Thanks Rupert.
I will keep this in mind if I run into performance issues.

By: Rupert

Rupert — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:05:37 +0000

For persistence (depending on how you are using the tree) if speed of access is more important than speed of writing you might want to look at using nested sets as these allow you to do things like get a node and all of it’s children with a single query.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:00:16 +0000

A maybe object represents an object which may or may not be present. If an object is not present, and you were just returning the object itself (as in: did not use maybes) then it would be null. One advantage of the maybe is that it makes your code that much more declarative rather than just a null check. More info here: Maybe Null

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:16:59 +0000

Maybe? Is that some kind of null object? If so it looks awesome!