[wtp-dev] Questions on component.xml

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There's probably already been discussion
and answers provided for some questions that immediately came to my mind
while starting (and just staring, mind you :) to define our component.xml
files ....
but figured if I didn't know the answer,
perhaps it might be worth asking here so the answers would be repeated
for everyone. 

One part of our API that gets focus
in our component.xml files are classes or interfaces we implement that
we want docs, junits, and java doc. That's clear enough. 

But what about extension points? That's
a critical part of a specified API ... how are they represented in component.xml
files? 

A more minor case is "ids"
... there's some strings defined via plugins or extensions that we expect
others to use as API (editor IDs, content menuIDs, are obvious cases).
While these can sometimes be redundantly specified in JavaCode to be used
as constants (eg. we've done that for our contentTypeIds) there's no hard
and fast rule that it has to be, or that it is even always desirable. Its
there a suggested way to capture these IDs which are not defined in Java
Code?

Lastly, the hardest, what about our
implementations of other's interfaces? These may be some critical areas
to have JUnit test coverage for, but as far as I can tell, that's a whole
other problem not related to component.xml and our measurements? But in
some cases we may need some amount of doc for? I see this strongly in org.w3c.dom
API's ... since we have our own DOM implementation ... we don't expose
our implementation as API per se, but we do expose it through the org.w3c.dom
interface ... that is, obviously, we expect clients to write code to the
org.w3c.dom interface which uses our implementation (our instance being
obtained from one API, naturally). If this one is carried to extreme, I
think we'd find thousands of cases where we implement base eclipse APIs
(either interfaces, or subclassing such popular classes as 'Plugin', 'ITextEditor',
etc). Are any of these "implementations of others APIs" part
of the component.xml files? [I don't think so, but its a pretty fine line,
sometimes, or gives a distorted picture of "coverage" if not].


Thanks for any advice.