Designing robust interfaces is a challenge in distributed systems and solutions and care needs to be taken specially when interfaces span application boundaries. So what do i mean by robust interfaces?
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- They encapsulate underlying technology details well - i.e. do not have vendor or platform specific semantics, attributes, and data structures to be part of interface contracts unless absolutely necessary
- They are driven by business constructs and not by technical implementation. Interfaces should reflect business operations and not force a class or object to drive the business operation. This is also referred to as contract-first development.
- They minimize or eliminate calls that are unsafe or leave a system in an invalid state. The interface shouldn't let the caller invoke an operation assuming a previous call has been made to initialize sessions/variables. Why not provide a cleaner operation that performs the right sequence of steps?
- They return meaningful error details - including error code, options for rectification, or even time to retry etc. Simply returning an underlying stack trace ins't always good enough!
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