Safe API Upgrade

First consideration for any Application Programming Interface (API) is how it will evolve in the future.  This critical interface must stand the test of time, and should whenever possible be both upgrade and downgrade compatible. 

Let Me Save Incomplete Files

This is a usability problem that I have run into a number of times.   A programmer writes a UI screen to receive a long list of inputs in order to create an object in system.  Save is enabled only when all the inputs are filled in and verified valid.  This is a big problem.

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The Magic of MemFile

In the Purple Utilities Library is a class called MemFile which you can efficiently stream into and out of. Learn to use it properly can increase the efficiency of your programs when reading and writing data.

Keep Things the “Same”

This general design principle does not mean to never change anything, but to consciously create a paradigm where the same things have the same names and are accessed in the same way as much as possible.

Ultimate Java Exception Class

This is the third in a series about translatable exceptions (see Translatable Error Messages).  This post is about the class JSONException which contains the required features.

Exception Receiving

When you make a web service call, you want to report the problem to the user save as you do for any other part of the program, and that is through an exception object.  This post talks about converting the JSON received back into an exception object so that it can be reported properly.  This is the fourth post in a series about translatable errors for REST web services.

Variable Arguments for Messages

We need to construct an object which has a template and a set of parameter data values.  Java offers a couple of ways to do this, and this post shows how the variable parameter mechanism works easily and conveniently for this purpose.

JSON Translatable Error Messages

Second in a series on translatable exceptions, this discusses how an error message should be returned as JSON from a web-service API so that it the calling program can display the error in the right language for the user.

Translatable Error Messages

This is the first of a series of posts, I want to go over some of the groundwork of what it takes to make exceptions localizable into other languages. Nothing new here, but just want to explain clearly the requirements of a localizable exception messages.

Context Error Reporting

One of the biggest mistakes I see programmers make when writing an error message is to forget to include details about the context into the message.  The message effectively “assumes” that the reader knows the context, but that assumption is not always valid, and the error message can fail communicate.