A third technique that combines aspects of the first two is to adapt the Builder pattern (Item 2) from object construction to method invocation. If you have a method with many parameters, especially if some of them are optional, it can be beneficial to define an object that represents all of the parameters and to allow the client to make multiple “setter” calls on this object, each of which sets a single parameter or a small, related group.
I'll repeat: it'd be great if Java supported named parameters (with support for some being optional).
