2006/6/21, Kenneth Tam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
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)?
I think that eventSet is important async model. Although the actual usage may not be high, but it will be higher, especially considering SOA as next big thing. 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)
Agree on this. Just make it transparent for us, ok? - consider interop and co-existence with other annotation sets as an
important use case - JAX-WS - EJB 3 - JSR-250
Yes, definitely. - consider replacing compile-time code-gen with runtime bytecode gen
(asm or cglib style)
This is very important IMHO. One should be able to write a control and test it without waiting code generation. Code generation is not healthy for IDEs that consistently check for new files. Sometimes it even break the permanent generation of the underling VM! - 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)
For dependency injection, Spring guys are doing a common framework based on annotation. IMHO, Beehive Control should work closely with Spring guys, add on value where they can't reach. - 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.
-- Regards, Antony Chien
