Presentation: Joshua Bloch on Good API Design

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Nov 22, 2006

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Architecture ,

Java ,

Programming

Tags

Java SE

A well-written API can be a great asset to the organization that wrote it and to all that use it. Given the importance of good API design, surprisingly little has been written on the subject. In this talk (recorded at Javapolis), Java library designer Joshua Bloch teaches how to design good APIs, with many examples of what good and bad APIs look like.

Watch  How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters (1 hour, 10 min)

Recently Joshua Bloch was also interviewed by InfoQ about closures and new Java features (video) and he co-authored a new proposal to add closures in Java 7.

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   Excellent!

   by Rafael de F. Ferreira

   Best presentation I've seen in a while.

   Reply

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   Verrrry Nice

   by Vinu Varghese

   Thanks for such a nice presentatiion

   Reply

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   Well worth taking the time to watch.

   by tanguy rademakers

   A great presentation, both interesting and well presented. Thanks InfoQ.

   Reply

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   Excellent!

   by Gabriel Kastenbaum

   Sure to be not original at all but this presentation is excellent!
   Worth the time to watch.

   Reply

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   Re: Excellent!

   by karan malhi

   Very good presentation

   Reply

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   Makes a lot of activities in your brain

   by Alex Krotov

   Though I have 6 years of experience in Java field and more than half of advices/tips are already integrated in my head for long time, Joshua's presentation freshed my mind and revealed things I didn't consider closely.
   Thanks a lot for providing this video!
   It worth seeing twice if you're engaged in API (not only Java) design.

   Reply

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   Any chance in making your videos available in some sort of offline format?

   by Jason F

   Any chance in making your videos available in some sort of offline format?

   Reply

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   Re: Any chance in making your videos available in some sort of offline form

   by Oliver Gierke

   Some sort of podcast would be perfect... ;)

   Reply

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   How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters

   by Mikhail Vladimirov

   Mr. Bloch = Clear thinking + PhD + Occam's razor approach.

   Reply

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    Re: How to Design a Good API Why it Matters should avalible offline

    by nazish ali

    This presentation clear my most of the points .because he addressed the very good points of an API design.I agree with Alex. This is not only JAVA .
    It's better to get it offline due to streaming prblms.

    Reply

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    We need VideoCasts

    by Luiz Alberto Silva Oliveira

    I want to reforce the question about off-line videos, WE need it!!!
    Congratulations, the presentation is Excellent!

    Reply

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    Re: Any chance in making your videos available in some sort of offline form

    by chen jacky

    yes is very fun to listem such video ,i think its useful for listener

    Reply

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    Re: Excellent!

    by chen jacky

    where i can download this video

    Reply

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    Clear explanation of designing a good API.

    by YoungHyun Kim

    Actually, English is not my native language, but I could understand this presentation as he explained as well. Thanks Joshua & Thanks infoQ~!

    Reply

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    Excellent - as always

    by Georges Polyzois

    Thanx for this excellent presentation - as always by Joshua B.
    
    Pleas can we have an offline version!!

    Reply

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    Download presentation

    by jimens lima

    Where can i download presentation (ppt,pdf,...)?

    Reply

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    Re: Download presentation

    by Jirapong Nanta

    Hi all,
    i just google around ...
    pdf can download at - lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf
    
    Enjoy

    Reply

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    Good article

    by bin zhang

    Good article

    Reply

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    I love this website

    by Jerome St-Pierre

    I just watched this presentation 4 years later and everything said is still actual and not only for Java. This is why I love design so much.
    
    This man is a good speaker and I think these Javapolis events looks very cool, even if I am a .NET developer.
    
    Thanks for the high quality content, I never got so addicted to a website before.

    Reply

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    It's probably just me...

    by Dag Johansen

    I don't get the idea with the ThreadLocal and the keys. Since Bloch is such a luminary I can only suppose that there is a good reason behind the design he came up with, but I can't see it. So, in the interest of learning, and I figure I may not be the only one who doesn't get it, I will simply ask and hope someone can enlighten me (us, if I am not alone in this).
    
    
    
    I do understand the issue with the string keys being "global namespace". Of course it's not really a namespace at all, but string comparison does mean different parts of the code could more easily overwrite one another's data. However, what is the point of using thread locals anyway? I thought the idea was to enable any object that participates in the work of a thread to easily share information *without* having to distribute a reference to anything all over the place. If so, replacing the string key with an object key negates the whole point of using thread locals in the first place.
    
    
    
    Furthermore, if I have to ensure all objects that need to access some data have a reference to the Key instance, isn't it just as easy then to instead ensure they have a reference to whatever is associated with that key?
    
    
    
    What is it that I have misunderstood or simply not understood?
    
    
    
    I don't want to risk this becoming a debate about whether Java or .net is better, but I have to say it seems to me the .net solution (in which one places a ThreadStatic attribute on a static field to indicate it should be stored as a thread-local variable) is rather better. It solves the problem of accidentally using the same variables where one meant to use different ones, requires extremely little code, is transparent to the user of the class declaring the static member (of course the field should be private and exposed via a property, but this changes none of what I've said), and does completely away with the need to write boilerplate code to obtain references to these objects.
    
    

    
    public class Log
    {
       [ThreadStatic]
       static Log current;
    
       static public Log Current 
       {
          get { return current; }
          set { current = value; }
       }
    
       // .... Log implementation
    }
    

    
    
    
    
    Like this, whenever some operation starts that we'd like to log we'll simply create the log with

    Log.Current = new Log();

    and then any code that is called in the context of a current log can obtain a reference to it with

    Log log = Log.Current;

    or just use Log.Current.WriteLine() and so on directly.

    Reply

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