If this process (hardening the API and releasing it as public) would
have been followed, it would be great. Unfortunately, it seems there're
a bunch of useful APIs now which are not even part of the javadoc at
bits.netbeans.org (and therefore mostly unknown) and seem to never be
released.
Some other APIs (like Palette API) seem to have extensions in many parts
(= collections of modules building a functional part, like HTML support)
of NetBeans, which could probably be made more general and then moved
into the "Main API" (Palette, in this case), so everybody could use
those. E.g. html module seems to have the ability to activate parts of
different HTML APIs via layer, and some interface is there defined (but
not yet used) to do this programmatically (probably using annotations).
IMHO, this could be useful for other parts, too.
So, while NetBeans moves to Apache, I'd like to further discuss the
process of extending and hardening APIs.
Regards
Peter
Am 13.07.2018 um 04:28 schrieb Tim Boudreau:
The original idea of friend apis was to allow development of an api with
the understanding that nobody gets things perfect the first time, so
clients v could be developed but at the risk of dealing with breakage.
The point was for the api to be in friend mode until it matures, at which
point it becomes official compatible api. That's the part that never
happened - no mechanism pushing moving apis out of friend mode.
I'd suggest a rule that that happens automatically if a friend api has been
around for more than 2-3 releases. Enforcement of that could probably be
automated with a bit of auto bug filing cleverness.
-Tim
On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 7:11 PM Peter Nabbefeld <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello all,
I personally don't like "Friend" APIs, as really I like the idea of an
open, extensible IDE.
From my point of view, Friend APIs make it difficult or impossible to
extend NetBeans for personal use:
- You have to ask for being added to the friends list. This is
especially a problem, if You want to implement some private-use feature,
e.g. for Your employer.
- Alternatively You could depend on the implementation version; but I
don't see how to do that, if You're using Maven.
- Third possibility is just patching the modules to remove the friends
and make the API public - very ugly, and You have to do it after every
update.
OTOH, having a friends-only API leads to fewer dependencies on the API,
thus less impact from changes to the API, which makes work easier for
the developers, of course.
However, if an API isn't stable, yet, it could also just be flagged as
"Under Development", thus telling users of those, that it is subject to
change. Also, as it is possible to use default methods in interfaces
from Java 8, it should be less of a problem to extend an existing API.
But You can use the API on Your own risk without any conflicts.
An exception of course is having APIs only for modularity, if classes
are spread over different modules and need an API to interact with each
other. In this case the API's purpose is not to integrate extensions,
but to split responsibilities - in this case I fully agree these are not
for public use.
I'd be interested in comments on this - so, what do You think?
Kind regards
Peter
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