Hello Igniters, First of all, congrats to all the committers, former PPMC now PMC members and mentors for the project's graduation! Great work, everybody!
I have a question about the Coding Guidelines. Why do they enforce star imports? It is considered a bad practice for several reasons: 1. It pollutes the local namespace, leading to unnecessary name clashes. 2. Unexpected errors can occur if a class is added the package of a dependency we import. Of course, this would be detected at compile time and would make the build fail. But it's worrisome that we allow this to occur in the first place. Leads to unpredictable builds in case we have SNAPSHOT dependencies. 3. It makes it absolutely necessary to use a fully-fledged IDE to browse the source. People using simpler text editors like Sublime, vi or emacs will have a hard time unless they use plugins that can process pom.xml and add dependencies to classpaths (I haven't even installed these plugins – and I use Sublime 45% of my working time, as an example). 4. As an example of the latter, I'm currently working on adding OSGi support for ignite-core. I'm trying to figure out which classes require package org.jsr166; and for this I'm using Sublime, not IntelliJ, for lightweight browsing. Found several hits, but because I'm not familiar with the contents of the package by heart, I have absolutely no clue which classes of that package are being used our source files. If the reason/alleged benefit is simple convenience/brevity, I'm not quite sure it outweighs all the negatives. Thanks, *Raúl Kripalani* Apache Camel PMC Member & Committer | Enterprise Architect, Open Source Integration specialist http://about.me/raulkripalani | http://www.linkedin.com/in/raulkripalani http://blog.raulkr.net | twitter: @raulvk
