In simple terms, are we seeking to implement a system in which someone can
just run
sed 's/javax/org.apache.geronimo'
over their code which extends (e.g.) the JavaMail classes and have it all
guaranteed to work?
Yes and no ;-) I would hope that someone using JavaMail would use factory methods to gain access to the underlying implementation.
The point is to provide an impl which can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Sun version under the Apache license. So if I wrote a mail client which used the JavaMail API (following the spec) then I should be able to replace Sun's JavaMail jars with the Geronimo JavaMail jars and it should still work.
Final question: When I throw exceptions, what are the rules for the message I
throw? Do I just throw natural language (English) strings, or do I throw
tokens which can be resolved for i18n at print time, and if so what is the
format of those tokens?
I do not believe there is a final resolution on this yet. We will be moving towards i18n but right now not much (or any) of the system does.
--jason
