I am newbie to Java. I have some design questions.

Say I have a crawler application, that does the following: 1. Crawls a url and gets its content 2. Parses the contents 3. Displays the contents

1. How do you decide between implementing a function or a class? -- Should the parser be a function of the crawler class, or should it be a class in itself, so it can be used by other applications as well? -- If it should be a class, should it be protected or public class?

2. How do you decide between implementing a public or protected class? -- If I had to create a class to generate stats from the parsed contents for eg, should that class be protected (so only the crawler class can access it) or should it be public?

Thanks Ron