This programming style is commonly known as applying a "fluent interface" or fluent api. See Wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface</a>.<p>It is already heavily used by numerous Java frameworks like Hibernate (Criteria API, now part of JPA2), Apache Camel, and various mocking libraries like EasyMock and Mockito.<p>Concerning the SQL example in the blog post, there are quite a few Java libraries available that provide a fluent interface for building SQL. For an overview see <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/6565369" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/a/6565369</a>.