When you design a method in a Java class, some parameters may be optional for its execution. No matter it is inside a DTO, a fat model domain object, or a simple stateless service class, optional ...

In the Second Edition of Effective Java, Josh Bloch introduces use of the builder pattern in Item #2 for dealing with constructors that require too many parameters.

This illustrates a weakness of dealing with too many parameters with simple method overloading (overloading methods with same name based only on number and types of parameters).

[REQ] Adding optional query parameter breaks Java API We added a new optional query parameter to our REST API and regenerated the Java OpenAPI library. This caused the Java method signatures to break ...