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API Design Patterns
book

API Design Patterns

by John J. Geewax
July 2021
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
14h 40m
English
Manning Publications
Audiobook available
Content preview from API Design Patterns

16 Polymorphism

This chapter covers

  • What polymorphism is
  • The benefits of polymorphism and when to use it in an API
  • How best to structure polymorphic resources
  • Why polymorphic methods should be avoided in resource-oriented APIs

When building software systems, polymorphism provides the ability for objects to take many different forms, typically relying on explicit object inheritance. In this pattern, we’ll explore how to translate this powerful tool from the world of object-oriented programming to that of resource-oriented API design. We’ll also investigate a few guidelines for when to rely on polymorphic resources over completely independent resources.

16.1 Motivation

In object-oriented programming (OOP), polymorphism is the idea of using ...

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Publisher Resources

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