What are the advantages of chain-of-responsibility vs. lists of classes?

Question

Recently, I was discussing with another programmer the best way to refactor a huge(1000 lines) method full of \"if\" statements.

The code is written in Java, but I g

Answer 1

I like your idea with collection better than those successors. It makes it easy and clear to manipulate this set of handlers: the collections interface is well known and everybody understands how to iterate over a List or what not.

If you use this successor way suggested by a friend, take care not to fall into a very deep recursion (unless your platform supports tail calls, I don't know if JVMs are capable of that).

I wouldn't recommend adding any methods to the collection. You get much more complicated design that's harder to comprehend and harder to modify. There are two separate concerns: storing a set of handlers and the interpretation of this handlers as a chain of responsibility. A method that handles requests by iterating over a collection is on higher level of abstraction than collection housekeeping methods, therefore shouldn't belong to collection interface.