Craig L Russell wrote:
On Jul 4, 2008, at 1:37 AM, Murray Altheim wrote:
Janne Jalkanen wrote:
The reason why those were made private was because the API should
depend on the actual value of the strings, not the declared
constants. It was a mistake to declare them public in the first place,.
I don't follow the logic of that at all. If I've got code that
interacts with those constants (and they are constants), the
"actual value of the strings" is the constant value, which I
need access to programmatically.
To me, the reason to have a private String is to declare an
implementation detail. The reason to have a public String is to declare
a common artifact that is part of the contract of the component.
From this discussion it appears that the value of the String is part of
the interface definition that is shared among multiple classes, and as
such, should be public.
One nice side effect is code completion in code that depends on the
value. You can start to type InsertPage. PARAM_PAGENAME and the IDE will
suggest completions for it.
Craig,
In my experience it's a very common thing to extend a plugin, to simplify
its name or provide an alias (not having seen the aliasing feature of
jspwiki_module.xml until a few weeks ago), to provide a copy in another
package (so that only one path needs declaration in jspwiki.properties),
to set default values, alter default values, alter behaviour, to disable
features, or to use it as a component in a larger functionality.
The lessons on declaring things public, protected and private have been
reinforced many times while developing plugins -- things I thought were
implementation details turned out to be things that an extension needed
access to in the end, as a number of plugins I've written have been
extended in ways I'd not originally planned.
As for code completion, I'm one of those Luddites who still prefer to
program in vi and ant, though last week I took part in a multi-day
meeting with a vendor, discussing the details of an API. Their lead
developer was using Eclipse to navigate through the API and watching
the tooltips and popups of methods and class names was a reminder of
what I've been missing. I've used MS Visual C++ so I've seen this before,
but I'm *almost* convinced that using Eclipse would be more boon than
bane. Almost.
Murray
...........................................................................
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