What are the best practices for determining the tasks of Constructor, Initialization and Reset methods

Question

This is a general OOP question although I am designing in Java. I\'m not trying to solve a particular problem, just to think through some design principles.
From my experien

Answer 1

Is there a reason init() and reset() need to be different? It's hard to see in this simple example why the "does not instantiate anything" rule is important.

Beyond that, I think objects should be useful as soon as they're constructed. If there's a reason -- some circular dependency or inheritance issue -- an object has to be "initialized" after construction, I would hide the constructor and the initialization behind a static factory method. (And probably move the initialization code to a separate configurator object for good measure.)

Otherwise you're counting on callers always to call both the constructor and init(), and that's a non-standard pattern. We have some old, too-useful-to-throw-away code here that does that; it's an abstract dialog class, and what happens is, every time someone extends it, they forget to call constructUI() and then they waste 15 minutes wondering why their new dialog is empty.