Very interesting.
[Security & maintainability] /Create proper public APIs for
commonly-used JDK-internal APIs/ --- Survey existing bodies of source
code to learn which JDK-internal APIs are commonly used and, where
feasible, create JDK-specific or possibly standard APIs to replace them.
Will a survey be sufficient? isn't it useful to produce a basic
reference card for easier upgrading (like a wiki page mapping internal
API to newly added public API)?
---
More precisely, can a new wiki page contains the steps for reporting
request for enhancement of public API (where? Java bugs specially
tagged? post on a forum?) and collect in a simple table the
corresponding changes to allow developers to easily find equivalent
feature to internal API when upgrading applications?
A simple example:
One solution (without copying data or using an external library)
for indenting a StAX XMLStreamWriter is the use of
com.sun.xml.txw2.output.IndentingXMLStreamWriter [1,2].
Having on a wiki page, a table with one row like following (if Java
9 API add a new constant INDENT), would probably be a simple reference
card but very useful for developers upgrading applications:
com.sun.xml.txw2.output.IndentingXMLStreamWriter |
javax.xml.stream.XMLOutputFactory.setProperty(INDENT, true)
----
NB: I hope that ahead-of-time compilation to native code (Graal?) will
have API to allow developers to provide some guidance on best
optimizations for their programs (when choice is not automatic between
memory, performance, code expansion, startup time), even if this will
probably be with a non-public API
(An useful non-public API will become, after some times in the wild to
evolve and gain maturity, a future good public API.)
Thanks you,
Daniel.
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/290326/stax-xml-formatting-in-java
[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4616383/xmlstreamwriter-indentation
