APIs

APIs

We begin design and development of an application by examining application data. Assuming our example application deals with customers, we will probably need such data as first name, last name, phone number, street, city, zip and state. As we discussed earlier, we prefer to think in terms of aggregated data structures. In our example, they are Personal Information and Address. Personal Information consists of the First and Last Names. The Address contains City, Zip, State, etc. The definitions for these beans will look like the following.

<bean name="Person">
    <param  name="FirstName"  type="CcName">
    <param  name="LastName"   type="CcName">
</bean>

<bean name="Address">
    <param  name="Street"  type="CcString">
    <param  name="City"    type="CcName">
    <param  name="State"   type="CcString">
    <param  name="Zip"     type="CcNumber">
</bean>

Here CcString, CcName, and CcNumber are predefined types. They will be useful for validating and formatting the inputted data.