I need to remove a particular function or a class from my Java code when it is being converted into .jar file using Maven. But the caveat is the function or class should stay inside the source code.
Is there any such way in which I can achieve this using Maven and/or any Java utilities?
(there are a lot of functions ~400 and their implementations are very large as well therefore commenting the code is not an option)
Okay, so the real problem is this:
We have a code base which includes certain parts that are not currently being used, but they may be used in the future, so we want to keep them in the code base, but we do not want them to be shipped to customers. (Due to, uhm, reasons.) What are the best practices for achieving this? Note that commenting them out would be impractical.
The proper way to achieve this is to extract all those parts into a separate module, and refrain from shipping that module.
The hacky way is to use a hard-coded feature flag.
A normal (non-hard-coded) feature flag is a boolean which controls a certain aspect of the behavior of our software. For example, if you build an mp3 player application, and you want to add support for the aac file format, but you do not want to ship support for it yet, then you might want to create a boolean supportAacFeatureFlag() method, and have all code that pertains to the aac file format invoke that method and check the return value before doing anything. It is important to note that this must be a method, not a constant, so that its value is not known at compilation time, because every single if statement that checks the value of a constant is bound to yield a "condition is always true" or "condition is always false" warning. The great benefit of feature flags over commenting-out code is that the code controlled by a feature flag must still compile, so it must be semantically correct. The problem with feature flags is that they do not eliminate the code; the code still gets shipped, it just does not get executed.
A hard-coded feature flag is a feature flag which is implemented using a constant. The constant condition warning will be issued in every single use of that flag, so it will have to be globally disabled. (That's why this approach is hacky: we normally want all warnings enabled.) The benefit of using a constant is that its value is known at compilation time, so even though the compiler will still compile the controlled code, it will refrain from emitting any bytecode for it, so the code essentially does not get shipped to customers. Only empty functions get shipped.
Note that this is documented behavior of the Java compiler. In other languages like C++ and C# the compiler always emits all code, and you have to use other means of controlling code generation, like #defined symbols, which, in my opinion, are also very hacky.
An alternative way which I am sure some people will opt for but I would strongly advice against is to keep the unused code in a separate feature branch and remove it from the master branch. I would strongly advise against this, because any refactorings applied to the master branch will not affect the feature branch, so the code will diverge, so it will be a nightmare to integrate it in the future.
