[Py4j-users] New way to pass parameters to JavaGateway and deprecation of old way

[Barthelemy D. <bar...@in...>]

Hi,

I am receiving many reasonable requests to make JavaGateway and
JavaCallbackServer more configurable. Clearly, sending all parameters
to the JavaGateway constructor does not scale, so I created two
classes, GatewayParameters and CallbackServerParameters.

These classes are available in @master and will be the recommended way
to configure a gateway in Py4J 0.9. The existing parameters can be set
in these two new classes in addition to new parameters.

I am deprecating the other JavaGateway constructor parameters (e.g.,
port, auto_field, start_callback_server), which means that I would
like to remove the parameters in two releases. If you use these
parameters in 0.9, the behavior of Py4J should not change: if the
behavior changes, it's a regression bug and I'll fix it asap. The only
difference with 0.8 is that a log statement (level=DEBUG) will tell
you that the parameter is deprecated.

In Py4J 0.10, the log statement will use the WARNING level.

In 0.11, an exception will be raised if you use the deprecated parameters.

In 0.12 (or 1.0), these parameters will be completely removed.

If there is any concern regarding this deprecation procedure, I'm open
to suggestions to improve it.

Finally, on the deprecation topic, someone recently asked me if I
still planned to support Python 2.6. I had initially planned to stop
supporting this old version of Python, but considering that users are
still deploying Py4J in environments where Python 2.6 is the default
version, and because I do not specifically need any features
introduced in later versions, I'll continue to (1) support Python 2.6,
and (2) beg users to install virtualenv with a more recent version of
Python :-D

Barthélémy