Difference between staticmethod and classmethod

Question

What is the difference between a function decorated with @staticmethod and one decorated with @classmethod?

Answer 1

@decorators were added in python 2.4 If you're using python < 2.4 you can use the classmethod() and staticmethod() function.

For example, if you want to create a factory method (A function returning an instance of a different implementation of a class depending on what argument it gets) you can do something like:

class Cluster(object):

    def _is_cluster_for(cls, name):
        """
        see if this class is the cluster with this name
        this is a classmethod
        """ 
        return cls.__name__ == name
    _is_cluster_for = classmethod(_is_cluster_for)

    #static method
    def getCluster(name):
        """
        static factory method, should be in Cluster class
        returns a cluster object for the given name
        """
        for cls in Cluster.__subclasses__():
            if cls._is_cluster_for(name):
                return cls()
    getCluster = staticmethod(getCluster)

Also observe that this is a good example for using a classmethod and a static method, The static method clearly belongs to the class, since it uses the class Cluster internally. The classmethod only needs information about the class, and no instance of the object.

Another benefit of making the _is_cluster_for method a classmethod is so a subclass can decide to change it's implementation, maybe because it is pretty generic and can handle more than one type of cluster, so just checking the name of the class would not be enough.