Create fluent APIs where possible

A lot of commons-lang is design in an old fashioned way using static util methods. The problem of this design is, that it encodes a language into method names leading to lots of variations of the same method in one class. For example StringUtils has over 180 methods, 9 of which a related to splitting.

Instead of overloading methods and creating method name variations, we should try to implement fluent APIs. Examples:

Instead of:

StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml3(String)
StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4(String)
StringEscapeUtils.escapeXml(String)

the API could look like:

StringEscaping.escape(String).with(Escaping.HTML_3)
StringEscaping.escape(String).with(Escaping.HTML_4)
StringEscaping.escape(String).with(Escaping.XML)

So no additional methods are necessary when adding new escaping. There are more examples in commons-lang where the fluent design can be applied.