Greg,
Thank you for the answer. I've followed the [email protected] for a while
and I like your responsiveness.
It makes me feel confident as a new user of pivot.
I completely agree with the "getting the API right" philosophy.
The project is young and full of potential and no genius on earth can make it
right the first time.
.Net doesn't. It pretty much breaks compatibility every major X release.
Scala doesn't either.
Java didn't, but ends up with a cluttered API and a soooooo long javadoc full
of deprecated annotations.
A DTD will definitively help. Especially for an IDE (auto-completion, typing
validation etc..)
Anyway, I'm going to write my own <checkWTKX> Ant task and add it in my compile
target. I think it's a good idea. Just to be sure.
Cheers, and keep up the good work.
BTW: anyone on your team working on a GUI/WTKX designer tool?
/Serge
On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:44:31 +1300, Greg Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Serge,
We have historically made API changes across releases that have broken backwards
compatibility, particularly during our incubation as the platform evolved. We believe
that "getting the API right" is very important and can sometimes outweigh the
benefits of maintaining backward compatibility. However, as our user base grows, we will
be more conscious of the impact such changes will have and will ensure that breaking API
changes are adequately documented in our release notes.
An Ant task that verifies WTKX validity is an interesting idea - another option
we have discussed is providing a DTD to validate the XML structure. This is
currently on the table for Pivot 1.4.2.
Hope this helps,
Greg
On Jan 29, 2010, at 4:59 PM, Serge Le Breton wrote:
Hi to the team of pivot,
First of all, congratulations for this nice piece of software.
I like the Terra Look&Feel and the API design (static inner classes)
I'm coming from Swing and my notepad is full of questions I'd like to ask
but I start with a nontechnical one.
I've started a project with pivot 1.3. A few weeks later 1.4 was released.
1.4 broke my compilation and my runtime because of missing classes,
properties and styles keys etc...
Well, I don't mind -too much- compilation errors but the problem is runtime
errors with the WTKX serializer.
So before I start making an Ant task that grabs all my wtkx files and run
the serializer on them to look for errors -which I might do anyway- I'd
like to know:
Do you plan to continue breaking backward compatibility in future
releases? If so, anyway to have a 'breaking log' of some sort with a new
release?
Cheers
/Serge.
