Description Jeffrey Liu 2005-06-24 01:05:03 EDT

APIs is a very important aspect of any Eclipse projects. Traditionally, Eclipse 
has used the "internal" naming convention to define the separation between 
public APIs and internal APIs. However, such naming convention is too simple in 
practice. For example, let's consider an Interface that is an API in the sense 
that client can call methods on it. But at the same time, the same interface 
may not be an API because it is not suppose to be implemented by clients. In 
this case, the use of the naming convention does not help. So we need another 
way to define APIs to our clients.

Eclipse & WTP have adopt the use of something called the component.xml file as 
a vehicle to define APIs. Since this is rapidly becoming the Eclipse 
convention, other Eclipse project should start looking into this convention as 
well (similar to manifest.mf, single jar-ing of plugins, etc). To find out more 
information about this convention, visit:

Requirements doc:

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/*checkout*/org.eclipse.wtp.releng/apito
ols/api-usage-checking.html?rev=HEAD&cvsroot=WebTools_Project&content-
type=text/html

Design doc:

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/*checkout*/org.eclipse.wtp.releng/apito
ols/api-usage-checking-design.html?rev=HEAD&cvsroot=WebTools_Project&content-
type=text/html

General info:

http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/development/apiscanner/apiscanner.html