It seems our coding conventions are not respected fully, the code looked "off", I've reformatted this with Eclipse and got:

````
static String parent( String path ){
        if( path == null ){
            return null;
        }
        int last = path.lastIndexOf('/');
        if( last == -1 ){
            if( BASE.equals(path) ){
                return null;
            }
            else {
                return BASE;
            }
        }
        else {
            return path.substring(0,last);
        }
    }
````

Notice difference in using the else position and spacing in if(...) conditions