Request for comments: Bug 6306820

[Richard Kennard]

Michael,

Given that I sort of disagree with both these comments, should I just 
take it that this is what the CCC wants and make the changes anyway?

My disagreements would be:

1. Overkill or not, surely defining an enum is more explicit, more 
type-safe and a generally stricter way of doing things that defining the 
contract in the JavaDoc and throwing an IllegalArgumentException at runtime?
2. I think the whole 'a URL parameter can have multiple values' issue is 
unintuitive, and returning either a List<String> or a String[] is going 
to be a surprise to people who just want a single String return value 
(witness the confusing nature of getParameter and getParameterValues in 
the Servlet API). Therefore, I'd rather follow ServletRequest which has 
beaten down this path for many years.

But, as always, I'll defer to the CCC if that's what you'd prefer?

Richard.

Michael McMahon wrote:
> The CCC request has received initial approval,
> which simply means that the API change is accepted in principle.
> But, we need to finalize the specification and submit it to the CCC
> for final approval.
>
> Due to the (large) amount of discussion that has already
> taken place, I don't anticipate that this will take too long.
>
> The following is a comment from the final CCC reviewer. The comments
> are based on an older version of the API, but they are still
> applicable to the current version.
>
> - Michael
>
> A couple of quick comments:
>
>  - The names of the elements of the URIQueryString.ParameterSeparator
>    enum should be in UPPER_CASE, per convention.  (Actually, defining
>    an enum for this seems like overkill to me; I'd be tempted to accept
>    a string argument and throw an IllegalArgumentException for anything
>    except "&" and ";").
>
>  - Using string arrays in the URIQueryString API is just wrong; these
>    should be List<String>.  (Mimicing the ServletRequest API is of
>    marginal value at best, and so not an argument for using String[].)
>
>
>