Java design / object oriented design issue

Question

I have a design dilemma I want to share with you guys: I have a class with various member variables that represents a person. One of the members is the home location of the person in coordinates. This class is persisted in a MySQL database.

The issue I have is that I want to have a list of people that are within a certain radius from the recorded distance from the specified person.

I successfuly created an SQL query that returns a result set with the person's details, and its distance from the pin point. But now is the problem: what's the best way to save this data in Java? Saving the distance inside the person class's members is not good, because the distance is not relevant to the person object. I thought about creating a two dimenesional array which holds the person in the first column and the data in the other. Another option I thought is to create a container object with two values, the person and the distance.

What do you think is the most efficient and "object oriented way" of doing that?

Answer 1

It looks like a job for a Map<Person, Double>.

Answer 2

I would provide a connection class that holds the distance and person information.

class PinPoint
{
    private double x; // Assuming
    private double y;

    public List<Connection> getConnections(double radius)
    {
        // Return a list of connections with the person and distance information
    }
}

class Connection
{
    private double distance;
    private Person person;
}

That way you can add more things in the connection class later on, too. If you don't need it a simple map might suffice, too.