Anything but return this == other would be counter intuitive and violate the principle of least astonishment. Two enum constants are expected to be equal if and only if they are the same object and the ability to override this behavior would be error prone. Same reasoning applies to hashCode(), clone(), compareTo(Object), name(), ordinal(), and … 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
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
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
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
From Best Practices for Exception Handling: Try not to create new custom exceptions if they do not have useful information for client code. What is wrong with the following code? public class DuplicateUsernameException extends Exception {} It is not giving any useful information to the client code, other than an indicative exception name. Do not … Read more
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 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
Best practice for RESTful API design is that path params are used to identify a specific resource or resources, while query parameters are used to sort/filter those resources. Here’s an example. Suppose you are implementing RESTful API endpoints for an entity called Car. You would structure your endpoints like this: GET /cars GET /cars/:id POST … Read more
I strongly oppose 404 in favour of 204 or 200 with empty data. Or at least one should use a response entity with the 404. The request was received and properly processed – it did trigger application code on the server, thus one cannot really say that it was a client error and thus the … Read more