Ran into this with a REST XML API recently where someone was trying to do some r... | Hacker News

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joelhaasnoot on April 27, 2012 | parent | context | favorite | on: An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our em...

Ran into this with a REST XML API recently where someone was trying to do some reflection-type serialization of XML. The API had longitude and latitude of all train stations, and some genious decided to call the tags 'lat' and 'long'. 'long' conflicted with the datatype Long and it wasn't fun. Version 2 of the API has fixed this issue luckily.

nicholaides on April 28, 2012 [–]

"Lat" and "Long" seem like great tag names for this purpose. It sounds like the problem wasn't this guy, but the "reflection-type serialization of XML".

joelhaasnoot on April 28, 2012 | [–]

Sure, it's partly both, but 'lat' and 'lon' are used almost universally across Geo-related APIs. See Google Maps for instance.

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