Provides client-side APIs for use with the RedDwarf Server.

API conventions

Interfaces in this API do not extend {@link java.io.Serializable} even if classes that implement those interfaces are required to implement it.

The API uses this approach to avoid an issue involving the serialVersionUID field. To guard against serialVersionUID mismatches, as well as to improve performance, any class or interface that extends Serializable should declare a serialVersionUID field. Since public interfaces can only declare public members, a public interface that extends Serializable would need to have a public serialVersionUID field, meaning that any classes implementing the interface would inherit its serialVersionUID, and so would be prevented from controlling their versioning separately. This issue does not crop up for interfaces that do not extend Serializable, since they by definition have a serialVersionUID of 0.

Documentation conventions

Unless explicitly specified otherwise, all documentation for these APIs uses the following conventions:

If null is not explicitly specified as an acceptable value for a method parameter, then the method does not permit null to be passed as a value for that parameter, and will throw a {@link java.lang.NullPointerException} if null is passed (though it is left unspecified whether or not NullPointerException takes precedence over other types of exceptions that could also be thrown).
If null is not explicitly specified as an acceptable value for a method to return, then the method is not permitted to return null.
If null is not explicitly specified as an acceptable value for a given collection (e.g. {@link java.util.Collection}, {@link java.util.List}, or {@link java.util.Set}) to contain, then the collection is not permitted to contain null elements.

Methods that can accept or return null values generally specify this at least in their parameter-level (i.e. @param tag) or return value-level (i.e. @return tag) documentation.