Do they? I always get confused by which is which between skin
additions and skin extensions. Anyway, why wouldn't skin A' that
extends Skin A pick up all of the extensions and additions to A? Or, is
the case you are worried about that the customer has their own skin B
that extends skin A but wants to pick up the changes available in A'.
However, in that case, isn't the change still essentially one line?
Instead of changing trinidad-config to point to A' (since it already
points to B), the skinner changes skin B to extend A'?
The reason I'm pushing back on this is that the skin files are confusing
enough without adding skin versioning into the mix.
-- Blake Sullivan
Matt Cooper said the following On 1/20/2010 3:09 PM PT:
Hi Blake,
Aside from the opt-in setting for end users choosing which skin to display,
application developers would also be impacted. Application developers would
need to extend all skins instead of just extending 1 skin whose version
number could be arbitrarily changed by the end user.
Thanks,
Matt
On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Blake Sullivan
<blake.sulli...@oracle.com>wrote:
Matt,
Why wouldn't it be sufficient for the new skin the extend the old? What
problems does this add other than forcing customers to modify their
trinidad-config to use the new skin name in order to opt in?
-- Blake Sullivan
Matt Cooper (JIRA) said the following On 1/20/2010 2:09 PM PT:
Skinning framework support for skin versioning
----------------------------------------------
Key: TRINIDAD-1691
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TRINIDAD-1691
Project: MyFaces Trinidad
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: Skinning
Reporter: Matt Cooper
UI designers periodically create new UI designs for various components
with the goal of these designs being applied to a specific skin. Although
the visual design might be completely new for a given component, it is
really meant to be available in context of other existing component designs
of the same existing skin.
UI changes like this are sometimes considered to jarring for some
customers and they would rather stick with the original designs. This means
that skins are eternally frozen after their first release so any new changes
would need to be made in a new skin even though that new skin might be 75%
identical to the original skin.
There is also a negative impact on customers that generate their own skin
definitions when we introduce a new skin name. Every skin (or skin
addition) that they have created won't be able to uptake the new designs
unless they physically go in and change all references from the old skin
name to whatever the new skin's name is. To remedy this while enabling the
"frozen" state of the original designs, the skinning framework must support
a concept of versioning. Since the nature of software means that code lines
branch into a vast tree structure, the version numbers of the skinning
framework must fulfill this need. A simple "x.y" will not be sufficient, we
will require "x.y.z.a.b.c.d.e.f.g" and so on where each "." represents
another code branch off of the previous code branch, e.g. there will likely
be a version that looks like "1.1.12.4".
Customers will then need a configuration option where they can specify
which version of the skin they want to use. (Presumably near the same
location where they specify which skin name they want to use.)
Business needs:
Some customers need new UI designs applied to existing skins but other
customers need the skin to remain unchanged. Versioning will allow
customers to optionally buy-into the new UI designs while other customers
can happily live with the past designs.
