I've encountered the following problem pattern frequently over the years: I'm writing complex code for a package comprised of a standalone application and also a library version of the core that people can use from inside other apps. Both our own app and presumably ones that users create with the core library are likely to be run both ...
The wikipedia article about Law of Demeter says: The law can be stated simply as "use only one dot". However a simple example of a fluent interface may look like this: static void Main(string[] args) { new ZRLabs.Yael.Pipeline("cat.jpg") .Rotate(90) .Watermark("Monkey") .RoundCorners(100, Color.Bisque) ...
I am writing an .NET wrapper API for the Netflix API. At this point I can choose to represent URLs as either strings or URI objects. Seems to me there is a good case for both. So if you were using an API, which would you prefer? ...
Background: I am taking a class at my university called "Software Constraints". In the first lectures we were learning how to build good APIs. A good example we got of a really bad API function is the socket public static void Select(IList checkRead, IList checkWrite, IList checkError, int microseconds); in C#. The function receives 3...
I am re-designing part of our internal ORM tool, and I want to expose Field (a class that represents a field in the database, like CustomerFirstName) directly to the end-developer. So that was easy enough to accomplish, however the API got a little ugly because this Field class was previously used internally and is too open. For instanc...
I have some code that has a dynamic-class system in C++ that has a member called GetClassName(), a rather harmless name one would imagine. However when included in a large project with Windows headers all hell broke loose. Apparently Windows uses a #define GetClassName (GetClassNameA or GetClassNameW) which screws up everything, and my v...
I was recently watching a webcast about how to create a fluent DSL and I have to admit, I don't understand the reasons why one would use such an approach (at least for the given example). The webcast presented an image resizing class, that allows you to specify an input-image, resize it and save it to an output-file using the following ...
I have a package with a public abstract class Player { /*...*/ } and these public abstract class GamePlayer extends Player { /*...*/ } public abstract class TournamentPlayer extends Player { /*...*/ } public abstract class StatelessPlayer extends Player { /*...*/ } Users of the package need Players but in order to use the package w...
I have two questions really: 1) When would you use a package-private interface? 2) Is there a way to have a public interface which is closed for implementation outside its package? ...
I despise working with overengineered APIs that don't make simple things simple. Nonetheless, I'm working on designing an API for an open-source library and I'm starting to feel that I'm falling into the overengineering trap. I really can't tell for sure because, of course, I wrote the darn thing, so how it works is more obvious to me ...
Can anyone think of a good explanation for the fact that result of a dialog is a nullable bool in WPF? This has always baffled me. In WinForms it was an enum type and that made a lot more sense to me. ...
If you could add anything to Cocoa, what would it be? Are there any features, major or minor, that you would say are missing in Cocoa. Perhaps there is a wheel you have had to invent over and over because of an omission in the frameworks? ...
I'm learning Objective-C, and have a C/C++ background. In object-oriented C++, you always need to declare your method before you define (implement) it, even if it is declared in the parent class. In procedural-style C, IIRC, you can get away with just defining a function so long as it is only called from something else in the same ...
Note: Although my particular context is Objective-C, my question actually transcends programming language choice. Also, I tagged it as "subjective" since someone is bound to complain otherwise, but I personally think it's almost entirely objective. Also, I'm aware of this related SO question, but since this was a bigger issue, I thoug...
Say I had a class that has a static factory method, like this: public class Table { public static Table OpenTable(string path) { ITableFactory fac = IoC.Resolve<ITableFactory>(); return fac.OpenTable(path); } } and a factory class that looks like this: internal class TableFactory : ITableFactory { i...
Which is the better API? I think the latter approach is better because strings are interned. But I'm pining for succintness. Which do you think is better? [Task("Assortment", Author = "好先生", MenuTree = "The>Quick>Brown>Megan")] public partial class Form1 : MycForm, ITaskPlugin { } or this(strings can be interned): [Task("As...
I'm developing a product with a bunch of interlocking pieces (server, client, libraries, etc) and one of the pieces is a tiny library that users will link into their own client-side code (something kind of like the Flickr API or the Google Maps API). Once they've included that library, all of the interlocking bits magically hook themselv...
As most people are painfully aware of by now, the Java API for handling calendar dates (specifically the classes java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar) are a terrible mess. Off the top of my head: Date is mutable Date represents a timestamp, not a date no easy way to convert between date components (day, month, year...) and Date Calen...
I received a library from an external developer in form of a well defined API(in C++ and Java). What can be some tests to check if the library is thread-safe ? ...
I need to design a new API which models networked devices which have a large amount of attributes which vary quite a lot based on the device's type. The attribute set is not totally arbitrary though, it is a big set of known attributes. That said, with new devices come new attributes so the situation is never totally fixed. The network...