An API is a contract between a caller and a callee. The most common forms of API abuse are caused by the caller failing to honor its end of this contract. For example, if a program fails to call chdir() after calling chroot(), it violates the contract that specifies how to change the active root directory in a secure fashion. Another good example of library abuse is expecting the callee to return trustworthy DNS information to the caller. In this case, the caller abuses the callee API by making certain assumptions about its behavior (that the return value can be used for authentication purposes). One can also violate the caller-callee contract from the other side. For example, if a coder subclasses SecureRandom and returns a non-random value, the contract is violated.
EJB Bad Practices: Use of java.io
java.io package.In this case, the program violates the following EJB guideline:
"An enterprise bean should exercise caution when using the Java I/O package to attempt to access files and directories in the file system."
A requirement that the specification justifies in the following way:
"The file system APIs are not well-suited for business components to access data. Files might not be accessible from all instances, or their content might be different on different instances, and coordinating updates to the file can be difficult. Business components should use a resource manager API, such as JDBC, to store data."