Introduction to antipatterns

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This section is about common antipatterns that arise when API proxies are deployed on Apigee.

What is an antipattern?

An antipattern is a software design practice that is ineffective or counterproductive—in other words, the opposite of a "best practice." To put it another way, an antipattern is something that the software allows you to do, but that may have an adverse functional or performance impact.

For example, consider the omnipotent-sounding "God Class/Object". In objected oriented programming, a god class is a class that controls too many classes for a given application, as illustrated by the following reference tree:

TBD
Figure 1: God class

As the image illustrates, the god class uses and references too many classes.

The framework on which the application was developed does not prevent the creation of such a class, but it has many disadvantages, the primary ones being:

  • Hard to maintain
  • Single point of failure when the application runs

Consequently, such a class is an antipattern that you should avoid creating.

The good news is that you can identify these antipatterns and rectify them with appropriate best practices, which will make the APIs you deploy on Apigee best serve their intended purpose.

Summary of antipatterns

The following table lists some common API antipatterns:

Category Antipatterns
Policy antipatterns
Generic antipatterns
Backend antipatterns

Download antipatterns eBook

In addition to the links above, you can also download the antipatterns in eBook format: