Code organisation and differentiation between tools and utils packages [closed]

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About code organisation in packages, i have seen both tools and util used for the same purpose, ie. to contain classes that help with trivial and frequent tasks.

Example:

+ foo.util
|--  StringManipulation.java
|--  MyLogger.java
+ foo.tools
|--  InputSanitization.java
|--  IdentifyOS.java
|--  Whatever.java

From your experience, is there anything that distinguishes tools from utils?
How should such reusable code be organised?

Answer 1

Both "tools" and "utils" are bad names for classes/packages. It is not object oriented. It is a way of saying, "I don't know what to name this thing so I'll just give it a generic name".

What you should do is figure out what these tools/utils are really doing and name them appropriately.

Answer 2

Classes within the same package usually share the same or similar functionalities, or they together achieve a set of similar functionalities. In addition, classes within the same package can access all package-private variables (i.e., those variables defined without public, protected, and private) within their package.

As for naming, while Oracle has defined a convention for java naming packages, it is developer's responsibility to have a clear naming for each package. In your case, it is better to have some descriptions to describe the utilities and tools. Here are some examples:

foo.connection.tools
foo.string.utils

In this way, users can know the tools is for connections, utils is for string manipulations.