On 17 Dec 2004, at 22:32, Chris Lambrou wrote:
Someone suggested that for Log, it would be appropriate to make it an abstract class rather than an interface, so we can make these kinds of changes easier in the future. I think the risks for this are low, and probably better [less problems for the majority of users] than just adding new methods to the existing interface. Other thoughts on this direction?I think the risk of annoying quite a number of users by changing Log from an interface to an abstract class is actually quite high. For sure, one of the default logging implementations provided by JCL would probably suffice for the majority. However, there are groups who will have chosen, for whatever reason, to provide their own logging implementations. I've certainly worked on a couple of projects where this has been the case. One of them could probably cope with the change relatively easiliy, but such a change could be a real pain for the other. Whilst the proportion of JCL users in this situation is probably quite small, in terms of actual numbers, such a change could cause quite a lot of grief.
i think that simon was suggesting the new logical interface proposed is implemented (in java) as an empty abstract class as opposed to a interface. this would allow new methods to be added without breaking compatibility but at the cost of preventing implementations belonging to another type hierarchy.
does anyone think that there is any real need for implementations to belong to a second type hierarchy?
- robert
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