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.
J2EE Bad Practices: getConnection()
For example, a J2EE application should obtain a database connection as follows:
ctx = new InitialContext();
datasource = (DataSource)ctx.lookup(DB_DATASRC_REF);
conn = datasource.getConnection();
and should avoid obtaining a connection in this way:
conn = DriverManager.getConnection(CONNECT_STRING);
Every major web application container provides pooled database connection management as part of its resource management framework. Duplicating this functionality in an application is difficult and error prone, which is part of the reason it is forbidden under the J2EE standard.