Fluent interface

In software engineering, a fluent interface (as first coined by Eric Evans and Martin Fowler) is an implementation of an object oriented API that aims to provide more readable code.

A fluent interface is normally implemented by using method cascading (concretely method chaining) to relay the instruction context of a subsequent call (but a fluent interface entails more than just method chaining ). Generally, the context is

History

The term "fluent interface" was coined in late 2005, though this overall style of interface dates to the invention of method cascading in Smalltalk in the 1970s, and numerous examples in the 1980s. A common example is the iostream library in C++, which uses the << or >> operators for the message passing, sending multiple data to the same object and allowing "manipulators" for other method calls. Other early examples include the Garnet system (from 1988 in Lisp) and the Amulet system (from 1994 in C++) which used this style for object creation and property assignment.