From: Jack U. <jd...@ea...> - 2001-05-31 01:11:13
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If XML4J and Xerces were both supposed to be implementing the "official" namespace, how could they be placed in different packages? That would violate the spec! If I recall correctly, XML4J was not DOM Level 1 compliant. The documented interfaces were mostly all vendor-specific. Then when Xerces came along, they decided to support the official DOM API instead of being "functionally equivalent". The same thing happened between the time that Sun's Project X was first released and when JAXP came out. Project X was full of vendor-specific names; JAXP supports the DOM API. By the way, JAXP is not "another" XML interface -- it's main purpose is to insulate applications from the details of how a "specific" parser is found and initialized. You can use Xerces as the parser in JAXP, for example. In Matt's second example, he says that his approach toward the problem domain changed between his first attempt and his later project. I agree that a change in overall approach to a problem domain warrants a new package hierarchy. Absolutely. But again, I don't see version naming as a solution. I see an entirely different package name as being the right answer. I don't think either of these examples apply in my case with JOSDI. It's not that I can predict the future and write perfect code. I do think my approach toward implementing JDWP is generally in the right direction, close enough that I can provide a migration path and use the @deprecated tag appropriately. That's release 1.0 and beyond. Microsoft is at least somewhat responsible for the popularity of version naming conventions, at least in terms of interfaces. Anyone remember CreateWindowEx and other wonderful Win32 APIs? Or how about all the COM interfaces for DirectX and what-not that have numbers appended to them? They could have chosen some other mechanism. Despite my (ill-advised) flame towards Gilbert, I do agree that JOS as a whole needs to address the versioning problem. I have read a little bit about orthogonal persistence, and if JOS is going to support that, then versioning becomes a big issue. -- Jack D. Unrue jd...@ea... |