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POHow to design an easily-extensible API with the simplicity of Enums?
 

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  1. POHow to design an easily-extensible API with the simplicity of Enums?
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    <p>Sorry for the vague title; couldn't think of how to word it more clearly. Here are the highlights of the questions:</p> <p><strong>Highlights</strong></p> <ul> <li>Asking an API design question about the <a href="http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/exiftool-enhanced-java-integration-for-exiftool/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ExifTool for Java</a> library.</li> <li>Here is <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3021420/java-api-to-exiftool/7139392#7139392">an example</a> of what the current API looks like.</li> <li>As a <em>USER</em>, the API is super-simple to use because you just pass in Enums for the image metadata you want back.</li> <li>As a <em>DEV</em>, the API somewhat sucks because you cannot easily extend the base class with more Enum types to support additional metadata that may not be supported directly in the lib.</li> <li>Simply pre-defining and supporting "<em>all the metadata</em>" is <a href="http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">non-trivial</a>.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Question</strong></p> <p>Given that setup information, what I am after is trying to find a way to pre-define the 30 or 40 most common metadata flags that people typically want from their images; right now everything is <a href="http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/downloads/software/exiftool/javadoc/com/thebuzzmedia/exiftool/ExifTool.Tag.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">defined as an Enum</a>, but the class is not extensible this way.</p> <p>If I go the "Class-per-Metadata-flag" route, the extensibility will be simple, but the API will be a lot less friendly to use out of the box.</p> <p>I will consider making v2.0 of this library Java 8+ if closures offer a really beautiful and simple solution, but otherwise I'd obviously prefer to keep it compatible with more systems (Java 6/7) than less.</p> <p><strong>Summary</strong></p> <p>My goals for the library are "simple to use and extend" - I feel I have nailed the "simple to use" aspect with the 1.x release, but the library is not easily extensible and I'd like to correct that in the 2.x series.</p> <p>I have been sitting on the 2.x release for over a year waiting for inspiration to strike and it has eluded me; I am hoping someone can spot my mistake and I can move the lib forward in a really elegant way.</p> <p>Thank you for the time guys!</p>
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    1. USRiyad Kalla
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    1. COIf you want simplest, easiest, and most flexible/powerful to extend, [property bag](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html) is the way to go.
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      1. USMatt Ball
    2. CO@MattBall I am not all that familiar with that term. Looking at the Property section of that link, do you mean something like just passing in a Map with all the Keys representing metadata that the requestor wants and then the library filles in the associated Values for all those keys and returns the same Map? (not a bad idea... very simple and flexible)
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