Contents of Interface Design: Best Practices in Object-Oriented API Design in Java

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Interface Design
Best Practices in Object-Oriented API Design in Java
by Bill Venners

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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1. The Object

Guideline 1: Appreciate the significance of the object.
Guideline 2: See objects as bundles of behavior, not bundles of data.
Guideline 3: Design Service-Oriented Objects that use their state to decide how to behave.
Guideline 4: Understand the relationship between mutable service-oriented objects and state machines.
Guideline 5: Use Messengers to transmit information.
Guideline 6: Use Flyweights for pluggable nuggets of behavior.
Guideline 7: Use Immutables to represent values of abstract data types.
Guideline 8: Design objects that can defend themselves.

Chapter 2. Classes, Inheritance, and Composition

Guideline 9: Use classes primarily to serve as blueprints for objects.
Guideline 10: Use concrete classes to say "What objects are."
Guideline 11: Use composition enlist the help of other objects.
Guideline 12: Use class extension to model permanent IS-A relationships.
Guideline 13: Understand the difference between inheritance and composition.

Chapter 3. interfaces and Abstract Classes

Guideline 14: Appreciate the significance of the interface.
Guideline 15: Use interfaces to define large families or to say "What objects can do."
Guideline 16: Use interface extension to decouple services or restrict the semantic contract.
Guideline 17: Consider creating convenience implementations of your interfaces.
Guideline 18: Use abstract classes to provide default behavior or establish a small family.

Chapter 4. Design Patterns

Guideline 19: Understand the role of intent in design patterns.
Guideline 20: Use Decorators to avoid hierarchy explosion.
Guideline 21: Use Proxies to control access to objects.
Guideline 22: Use Iterators to provide access to the elements of a collection.
Guideline 23: Use Chain of Responsibility to delegate along a linked list of objects.
Guideline 24: Use Strategies to pass algorithms to objects.
Guideline 25: Use Commands to pass requests to objects.
Guideline 26: Use Event Generators for asynchronous notification.
Guideline 27: Use the Composite Pattern to treat objects and collections uniformly.
Guideline 28: Use Factories to delegate the production of objects.
Guideline 29: Use Template Methods to delegate to subclasses.

Chapter 5. The Semantic Contract

Guideline: Appreciate the significance of the semantic contract.
Guideline: Keep methods, objects, and packages focused.
Guideline: Strive for interfaces that are minimal and complete.
Guideline: Make common things easy, rare things possible.
Guideline: Make the semantic contract as explicit as possible.
Guideline: Make sure subtypes fulfill the semantic contracts of their supertypes.
Guideline: Avoid optional clauses in semantic contracts.

Chapter 6. Constructors and Methods

Guideline: Force a proper initial state.
Guideline: Design methods that do one thing.
Guideline: Make the types of your method parameters and return values as abstract as possible.
Guideline: Prefer polymorphism over instanceof and downcasting
Guideline: Prefer dynamic extension over reflection.
Guideline: Be suspicious of urges to create Interpreters.
Guideline: Provide a cleanup method to release non-memory finite resources.

Chapter 7. Exceptions

Guideline: Use exceptions to indicate a broken semantic contract.
Guideline: Throw exceptions on abnormal conditions.
Guideline: Use checked exceptions for conditions that client code may reasonably be expected to handle.
Guideline: Throw a different exception type for each abnormal condition.

Chapter 8. Thread Safety

Guideline: Appreciate the significance of thread safety.
Guideline: Understand the Java monitor.
Guideline: Consider thread-safety when designing any concrete class.
Guideline: Provide a friendly way to ask an object to stop its threads.

Chapter 9. Network-Mobile Objects

Guideline: Appreciate the significance of network-mobile objects.
Guideline: Use RemoteException to indicate network interaction may be involved.
Guideline: Make it easy for implementations to use RMI.
Guideline: Use lazy starting in network-mobile objects.
Guideline: Provide a public finalizer in addition to cleanup methods.

Chapter 10. Packages and Evolution

Guideline: Use deprecation, not a broken contract, if you have designer's regret.
Guideline: Understand the rules of binary compatibility.
Guideline: Understand the issues in evolving serializable objects.

Index
About the Author

I welcome all comments about this work-in-progress. Please e-mail your comments to bv@artima.com, or sound off in the Flexible Java Forum.


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