On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 08:14 -0400, James Carman wrote:
> > i think that the proposal could be improved. it's usually used as the
> > basis of the introduction paragraph for the component. a good proposal
> > is a powerful weapon against featuritus and scope drift. so, it's
> > important for the long term health of a project. 
> 
> > "The package shall create and maintain a suite of utility classes for
> > creating proxy objects" seems just a little short. it seems to me that
> > proxy is more like a minimal core of bridging API's for constructing
> > proxy's (with minimal dependencies) supported by a number of optional
> > implementations. 
> 
> That's just the first sentence of the proposals "Scope of the Package"
> section.  Here's the whole paragraph:
> 
> The package shall create and maintain a suite of utility classes for
> creating proxy objects written in the Java language to be distributed under
> the ASF license. The package will include many different "object provider"
> implementations.  The package will also serve as a repository for many
> useful interceptor implementations. The package will provide multiple "proxy
> factory" implementations, supporting different proxying technologies (JDK
> proxies, CGLIB, and Javassist).

IMHO that sounds more a like a description than a definition.

good scopes are tough but it's best to be declarative rather than
descriptive. the main use of the scope is to be able to know when a
particular bit of functionality is in-scope and when it'd be better to
create a new individual library. 

the problem with descriptive scopes is that if they are taken literally
then new work is almost always out-of-scope. 

thinking about the scope can really help a component discover it's
mission. for example, discussing the scope for math really helped to
define it's niche in the code ecology. 

this is an opertunity you only get once :) 

> The Commons Collections PROPOSAL.html file has this in its "Scope of the
> Package" section:
> 
> "The package will create and maintain a set of collections and related
> classes designed to be compatible with the Java Collections Framework, and
> to be distributed under the ASF license."
> 
> I tried to model proxy's documents after collections, since it is one of the
> most popular commons libraries.

unfortunately, it also has one of the worst scope statements :)

in the past, this lack of clarity resulted in arguments about scope.

- robert


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