Question

I am experiencing the pain of developing an API based on (Selenium2) Webdriver and here is my dilemma.

I have basically 4 packages:

com.example.qa.pageobject
com.exmaple.qa.setup
com.example.qa.test
com.example.qa.utils

In com.example.qa.test, i have test classes that “USE” classes from other packages.

I am ending up in the following test method.

@Test
    public void testScenario16786() {
        Login login = new Login();
        login.setUp();
        AddSingleDomain asd = new AddSingleDomain();
        asd.addSingleDomain();
        AddARecord ar = new AddARecord();
        ar.AddARecordTest();

    }

Now, this seems to be a very bad example of developing in Java, which almost seems procedural. Is there any other way of doing it ? Are there some RULES that i need to be aware of while designing an API, which will be used by others ? i am sure that this is somewhat of a classical problem and has been solved before, i just want to know what are the many ways of resolving this, like:

One resolution, could be to use Factory Pattern, and based on a key, a specific class is instantiated, which is good but is there a more elegant way ?

Answer 1

You might find the presentation “How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters” by Joshua Bloch to be helpful.