[platform-ui-dev] Status of JFace data binding

[Boris Bokowski <Boris_Bokowski@xxxxxxxxxx>]

With M5 being declared soon, I would like to give you an update on the
JFace data binding framework.

We have decided to *not* publish the data binding framework as official API
for 3.2 because it has not yet received sufficient review and/or adoption.
In particular, we were not confident that the listener notification API was
sufficiently stable.

Since we made the decision, we have been busy refactoring the framework to
address our concerns.  The result of this refactoring will be released into
HEAD next week.  The main changes were (0) renaming packages to
internal.provisional, (1) renaming IUpdatable to IObservable, (2)
restructuring the IObservable hierarchy, (3) the way listeners are
registered and notified, and (4) switching back to one-way converters.  I
will send instructions for migrating from the current framework to the
refactored version when I release it to HEAD. In a nutshell, (0) and (1)
are simple renames, (4) is more or less mechanical, and (2) and (3) only
affect you if you are currently implementing IUpdatable or listening
directly to an IUpdatable.

After the dust settles (i.e. in a few weeks), we will try to evolve the
provisional "API" in an upwards-compatible way as much as possible to give
early adopters a chance to use it for real. To this end, we will remove the
current "EXPERIMENTAL" warnings.  However, it is important to remember that
when the framework is promoted to real API, there will be a porting effort
for existing clients.  In the best case this porting effort amounts to an
organize imports on your source files, but obviously we cannot promise that
this is going to be all.

Thanks
Boris Bokowski