I mentioned in ModuleVersioningGuidelinesReview about a feature
mechanism rather than version numbers and thought I should probably
should explain that more.
The concern I had with version numbering is that there is a lot of
implicit information locked up in a single String or int. As the
objective of this is to cater for scenarios where there is skew between
consumer and implementation I think it is better to make this more explicit.
To that end, I was envisioning a mechanism where the consumer could
easily check if a specific feature was provided by the implementation
rather than seeing which version was there and then inferring.
To achieve this, I was thinking the primary interface would have a
method like:
/**
* @param className the class providing the feature
* @param featureId the feature to check for
* @return true if the implementation supports the requested feature
*/
boolean hasFeature(String className, String featureId)
This needs to be loosely coupled i.e. featureId Strings would be
documented but the consumer could not rely e.g. on a constant field as
that field may not be defined by earlier versions.
--
Jeremy
