Fwd: [xtext-dev] API Tooling

[Sven Efftinge <sven.efftinge@xxxxxxxxx>]

sending Chris' comments to the list.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Chris Aniszczyk <caniszczyk@xxxxxxxxx>

Date: February 10, 2009 10:02:56 PM GMT+01:00

To: Sven Efftinge <sven.efftinge@xxxxxxxxx>

Cc: Xtext dev list <xtext-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: [xtext-dev] API Tooling

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Sven Efftinge <sven.efftinge@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It might make sense in many scenarios.
However, we want to technically allow use of non-public API, therefore we've to export more than just the stable stuff.
We want to mark some of the exported interfaces, classes explicitly as stable, so the user can be sure that we won't do any breaking changes there.

In Eclipse, we accomplish this by exporting every package, whether it is x-internal or not because we find people want to access internal things. The things that are stable are simply the things that aren't x-internal. It's that simple :)

At Eclipse, we are very careful at what we mark as public API, it means you're stuck with that API until a major release change (ie., 2.0 -> 3.0)

If you need anymore help, let me know.

Oh on a side note, we are actually not capable of generating reports of API usage... ie., who is using your API given a set of bundles. For example, check out this report from the Eclipse SDK:

http://www.eclipse.org/pde/pde-api-tools/apiusage/sdk_html.zip

--
Cheers,

~ Chris Aniszczyk