Return java.net.URI in the UriTemplate.expand method?

[cskinfill]

should the expand method(s) return a URI instance rather then a String?

[Ryan J. McDonough]

I thought about that early on, but many of the tools that I intended this to work with don't make use of java.net.URI. For example:

• Apache HTTP Client
• Async HTTP Client
• Sesame
• Jena

There's more but I think you get the picture. I didn't really make much sense to create an instance of a class that wasn't going to be used. With that said, String was the lowest common denominator.