Law of Demeter is very confusing because looks like I couldn't ever write methods that return objects

It feels like I've come to a dead end. If I understood it right then if I follow the Law of Demeter I can never make a method that returns an object and then 开发者_如何转开发client code makes calls to it. I'm just thinking about the Factory Pattern which always returns an object. Yes, there are mapper classes that return objects. And how about collections?

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You've misunderstood the Law of Demeter and are applying it beyond the point of usefulness:

More formally, the Law of Demeter for functions requires that a method M of an object O may only invoke the methods of the following kinds of objects:

• O itself
• M's parameters
• any objects created/instantiated within M
• O's direct component objects
• a global variable, accessible by O, in the scope of M

Factories in particular are used to create an object, and the type of object they create is part of their public interface. Thus, calling methods of an object created by a factory is allowed by the above.