Someone put it better than I could ever say it: Class Date represents a specific instant in time, with millisecond precision. The design of this class is a very bad joke – a sobering example of how even good programmers screw up. Most of the methods in Date are now deprecated, replaced by methods in … Read more
A year later, I ended with the following compromise (for database rows that contain a unique identifier): Assign all resources a canonical URI at the root (e.g. /companies/{id} and /employees/{id}). If a resource cannot exist without another, it should be represented as its sub-resource; however, treat the operation as a search engine query. Meaning, instead … Read more
You should return a 401 Unauthorized Status Code. You might additionally provide hypermedia to establish the token again Think about what happens in a web app. You go to say a banking site. If not auth’d it will send you to the log in page. Then you log in and you are good to go … Read more
The Big Picture There are two issues at play here: Integer getInteger(String) doesn’t do what you think it does It returns null in this case the assignment from Integer to int causes auto-unboxing Since the Integer is null, NullPointerException is thrown To parse (String) “123” to (int) 123, you can use e.g. int Integer.parseInt(String). References … Read more
I would tend to use US-English as that has become the norm in other APIs. Speaking as an English programmer, I don’t have any problem using “color”, for example.
The issue is that String.valueOf method is overloaded: String.valueOf(Object) String.valueOf(char[]) Java Specification Language mandates that in these kind of cases, the most specific overload is chosen: JLS 15.12.2.5 Choosing the Most Specific Method If more than one member method is both accessible and applicable to a method invocation, it is necessary to choose one to … Read more
I’m not completely sure how your data is handled, so this may or may not work, but have you considered paginating with a timestamp field? When you query /foos you get 100 results. Your API should then return something like this (assuming JSON, but if it needs XML the same principles can be followed): { … Read more
Is a viable RESTful choice, but obviously has the limitations you have described. Don’t do this. It would be construed by intermediaries as meaning “DELETE the (single) resource at /records/1;2;3” — So a 2xx response to this may cause them to purge their cache of /records/1;2;3; not purge /records/1, /records/2 or /records/3; proxy a 410 response … Read more
Why aim for a RESTful design? The RESTful principles bring the features that make web sites easy (for a random human user to “surf” them) to the web services API design, so they are easy for a programmer to use. REST isn’t good because it’s REST, it’s good because it’s good. And it is good … Read more
I have some recollections from the early design of the Streams API that might shed some light on the design rationale. Back in 2012, we were adding lambdas to the language, and we wanted a collections-oriented or “bulk data” set of operations, programmed using lambdas, that would facilitate parallelism. The idea of lazily chaining operations … Read more