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= DevFaqLookupCookie
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:jbake-tags: wiki, devfaq, needsreview
:jbake-status: published
:keywords: Apache NetBeans wiki DevFaqLookupCookie
:description: Apache NetBeans wiki DevFaqLookupCookie
:toc: left
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:syntax: true

=== What is the difference between getCookie(Class), SharedClassObject.get(Class) and Lookup.lookup(Class)?

All of these are really historical variations on the same theme.  In all cases, you pass a `Class` object and get back null or an instance of that class.  You can see the progression in genericness:

`SharedClassObject` is the oldest version of the Lookup pattern in NetBeans APIs, dating to circa 1997 (because of various performance issues, eventually all usages of `SharedClassObject` should be deprecated and removed from the APIs).  You'll see that form used in `SystemOption` for storing settings, and most of the singleton Action objects in the actions API.  All objects returned by it will be instances of `SharedClassObject`.

`getCookie()` (circa 1999) is specific to link:DevFaqWhatIsANode.asciidoc[Node]s and link:DevFaqDataObject.asciidoc[DataObject]s.  It uses the same pattern, but all objects returned by it will implement the empty `Node.Cookie` marker interface.

The down-side to both of the above is that they specify the return type.  In the case of `Node.Cookie`, in practice, this meant that anything that might possibly need to be provided by a `DataObject` or `Node` needed to implement this silly marker interface, forcing it to have a dependency on the Nodes API, or a wrapper Cookie class had to be created to provide the underlying object, which just added useless classes and noise.

link:DevFaqLookup.asciidoc[Lookup] is the most modern and generic version of this pattern, and probably the final one.  It offers two advantages:

1. Its return type is `java.lang.Object`, so it can be used directly with anything
2. Having objects _own_ a lookup rather than directly providing a `lookup(Class c)` method makes it easier to replace or proxy the Lookup of some object

=== Apache Migration Information

The content in this page was kindly donated by Oracle Corp. to the
Apache Software Foundation.

This page was exported from link:http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqLookupCookie[http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqLookupCookie] , 
that was last modified by NetBeans user Admin 
on 2009-11-06T15:51:49Z.


*NOTE:* This document was automatically converted to the AsciiDoc format on 2018-02-07, and needs to be reviewed.