I've had a few conversations recently about what kinds of changes/improvements might make sense for Beehive controls to make them more accessible and usable in light of all the changes that have gone on in the Java development world since controls were originally designed. Here are some rough thoughts/ideas I've had; I'll probably start exploring some of these ideas in the coming weeks via prototyping in a sandbox and post more detailed explanations of what I'm thinking.
Goal: Rearchitecture to incorporate support for various contemporary container and ease-of-development technologies, and strea mline/modularize feature-set based on developer feedback. Support strong separation of service provider/consumer concerns - continue to expect control implementation authors (service providers) to be more highly skilled Java developers than consumers. - focus more on adding value to consumers, less on making it easier for the provider (plenty of other technologies in t hat space). - controls _usage_ should continue to be highly toolable Key use case is consumers authoring interface extensions for extensible controls - rich support for provider-defined annotation grammars & associated semantics - think of controls as making Java dynamic proxies easy & annotation/metadata driven. - focus on resource access / smart proxy problem De-emphasize nested controls case - controls no longer positioned as generic logic containers - just write pojos, use other containers and their features - limit or refactor eventset support (how important has this been in actual usage)? Make it easier to use controls from anywhere by reducing/refactoring container requirements - remove or refactor dependency on JavaBeans Runtime Containment and Services Protocol specification (unclear that valu e of that framework justifies cost/complexity) - consider interop and co-existence with other annotation sets as an important use case - JAX-WS - EJB 3 - JSR-250 - consider replacing compile-time code-gen with runtime bytecode gen (asm or cglib style) - delegate dependency injection/IoC responsibilities; replace @Control and @Context - expect developers to use injection container of their choice - Spring - EJB3/JSR-250 (@Resource) - refactor declarative property configuration (usage of @Property annotations on fields marked w/ @Control) to make it optional (just another source of injection) - pluggable lifecycle support (can we replace ResourceContext?) - JSR-250 (@PostConstruct, @PreDestroy) --- Would love to hear some comments/feedback, especially about other ideas of how controls might be more useful in conjunction with all the other Java technologies that have proliferated in the past few years.
