Need advice on wordy naming of methods

Question

I'm writing an API for creating geometric shapes, and I'm running into some difficulties naming my methods.

Let's take a simple case: Creating a circle. Most of us might be familiar with a method like graphics.drawEllipse(x, y, w, h). To draw a circle, you need to know the top left coordinate, and the width and height of the circle.

My API is intended to make it easy for a developer to draw shapes using a variety of information, without doing a lot of math - which is trivial for circles, but more complicated for other shapes. For example, you should also be able to draw a circle given its center coordinates and radius, or the top left and bottom right coordinates.

So I have a Circle class with factory methods like:

Circle.createWithCenterAndRadius(cx, cy, r)
Circle.createWithBoundingBox(x1, y1, x2, y2)
Circle.createWithWidthAndHeight(x, y, w, h)

I feel like there might be a "code smell" here, but I'm not sure. On the one hand, these factory methods are necessarily descriptive. On the other hand, I can forsee these method names getting out of control. For example, how would I name a Triangle factory method that creates a triangle given a point, the length of one side, an angle, and the length of another side? Triangle.createWithPointSideAngleAndSide(x, y, side1, angle, side2)? Is that just evil?

If you were to use this API, would method names like this be okay to you? Do you have advice on how I can make the method names more sane?

Answer 1

You might change your circle methods to

Circle.FromCenterAndRadius(...)
Circle.FromBoundingBox(...)
Circle.FromWidthAndHeight(...)

It implies that you're creating circles from their different representations in a kind of concise way...