Confessions of a Java Framework
Practical API Design
Confessions of a Java Framework Architect
Author : Jaroslav Tulach
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-0973-7
Without a doubt, there are people who develop APIs correctly; otherwise there would not be as many great and useful software products out there as there currently are. However, sometimes it
seems that the design principles, the main rules of API design, are acquired subconsciously. Designers tend to follow rules without actually knowing or understanding the original motivation leading to the choices they make. As a result, the subconscious knowledge of good API design is built by trial and error, which obviously takes time. Moreover, the result of this process is typically a loose collection of tips on how to do things “right.” Though this is a useful step forward, such a collection often suffers from two problems. First, tips of this nature are often tightly tied to a particular operational area. For example, they might work fine for one project or for a dedicated group of people, but the usefulness to other teams or the applicability to other projects is not guaranteed at all.
Second, in these cases it’s difficult to transfer knowledge to people with a different way of thinking. If your experience shows that Java classes are preferable to Java interfaces, while this experience is gained from working on a specific problem, the experience becomes difficult to transfer to a different scenario. You can try to convince others that this is the correct approach, but in the end, without an appropriate explanation of the related reasons, you can only hope for adoption on the basis of faith. Faith can only create believers and rejectors, which is not the intention of knowledge transfer.
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