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I have read the following discussions:
Should private helper methods be static if they can be static , and
Should all methods be static if their class has no member variables
It seems that people in general would accept static methods, but are a little bit skeptical about it, for the following 2 reasons:
And the most acceptable static methods are private static ones. But then why do static methods exist at all, and in what situations they are the first priority to be adopted?
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Static methods are usually preferred when: All instance methods should share a specific piece of code (although you could still have an instance method for that). You want to call method without having to create an instance of that class. You must make sure that the utility class is never changed.
Since static methods cannot reference instance member variables, they are a good choice for methods that don't require any object state manipulation. When we use static methods for operations where the state is not managed, then method calling is more practical.
You should consider making a method static in Java : 1) If a method doesn't modify the state of the object, or not using any instance variables. 2) You want to call the method without creating an instance of that class.
A static method in Java is a method that is part of a class rather than an instance of that class. Every instance of a class has access to the method. Static methods have access to class variables (static variables) without using the class's object (instance). Only static data may be accessed by a static method.
Static methods aren't hard to test in and of themselves. The problem is that other code calling the static method is hard to test, because you can't replace the static methods.
I think static methods are fine either when they're private or when they're "utility" methods - e.g. to do string escaping. The problem comes when you use static methods for things that you want to be able to mock out or otherwise replace within tests. Factory methods can be useful too, although dependency injection is generally a better approach - again, it partly depends on whether you want to be able to replace the functionality in tests.
As for not being "OO" - not everything you write in a generally OO language has to be "pure" OO. Sometimes the non-OO route is simply more pragmatic and leads to simpler code. Eric Lippert has a great blog post about this, which unfortunately I can't find right now. However, there's a comment in this post which is relevant. It talks about extension methods rather than static methods, but the principle is the same.
Extension methods are often criticized as being "not OOP enough". This seems to me to be putting the cart in front of the horse. The purpose of OOP is to provide guidelines for the structuring of large software projects written by teams of people who do not need to know the internal details of each other's work in order to be productive. The purpose of C# is to be a useful programming language that enables our customers to be productive on our platforms. Clearly OOP is both useful and popular, and we've therefore tried to make it easy to program in an OOP style in C#. But the purpose of C# is not "to be an OOP language". We evaluate features based on whether they are useful to our customers, not based on whether they conform strictly to some abstract academic ideal of what makes a language object-oriented. We'll happily take ideas from oo, functional, procedural, imperative, declarative, whatever, so long as we can make a consistent, useful product that benefits our customers.
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