Best practice for returning multiple values in Java?

Question

Today I\'ve added a extra security check behind my login forms, to slow down brute force attacks. I\'ve got multiple login forms and made a nice easy to call function that d

Answer 1

You can define a Pair class, and a Triplet class, and that would solve the problem of returning 2 and 3 values while ensuring type-safety. In this particular case, the signature could be

public static boolean validateLogin(HttpServletRequest request,
            String email, String password, Pair outputIfOk);

Or even better, in a servlet context, it may make sense to set some well-documented request attributes.

If you find yourself needing special classes to return results very often, you can most likely refactor those clases to share a common ancestor (say, have a RequestStatus which includes the 'ok' and 'message' fields).

Other than that, yes, you are being lazy -- custom clases will always be more self-documenting than Pairs and Triplets.