> Who hasn't been annoyed by the format and configuration of the .api
> files... as we (er, Mike) now control the tools, we might as well
> support a better form of defining wocomponent apis, and one which
> can also show up in java docs. We already have the ..inding foo Foo
> to bind to" javadoc tag, but could do better with annotations with
> sth like:
I see a couple problems with it. One is that with annotations is that
you need the annotation class in your classpath, which means that
everyone who wants to use this has to put it in their project, which
means it's a lot less likely to be used (because it's an extra step
you have to do that new people will have no idea about). In the
scheme of things, I think this would be more work to write API files
this way. You're also not really avoiding the inverse logic thing --
that's still there, just in qualifier form instead of xml form. You
do get javadoc for free, but I was planning on writing a doclet that
can parse the API files, which shouldn't be TOO big of a deal. I
personally think that a graphical validation builder would probably be
a better investment of development time (and probably adding a picker
to the current bindings list that lets you pick from methods/ivars of
the class to make it easier to add entries).
But if you wanted to do this, we could pretty easily make ApiModel an
interface and make sure all the entry points go through a factory so
you could provide a second implementation. I don't know that I want
to personally maintain two ways of doing this, though, and I think I
actually would prefer the nicer editor view for this one.
ms
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