PDE API Tools
Introduction to API Tools
API tooling will assist developers in API maintenance by reporting API defects such as binary incompatibilities, incorrect plug-in version numbers, missing or incorrect @since tags, and usage of non-API code between plug-ins.
The tooling will be integrated in the Eclipse SDK and will be used in the automated build process.
Specifically, the tooling is designed to do the following:
- Identify binary compatibility issues between two versions of a software component or product.
- Update version numbers for plug-ins (bundles) based on the Eclipse versioning scheme.
- Update @since tags for newly added classes, interfaces, methods, etc.
- Provide new javadoc tags and code assist to annotate types with special restrictions.
- Leverage existing information (in MANIFEST.MF) to define the visibility of packages between bundles.
- Identify usage of non-API code between plug-ins.
- Identity leakage of non-API types into API.
Current Development
API Tooling now has additional Ant tasks that can be used to derive the usage graph between given sets of bundles. The information can be extracted to XML and converted to HTML.
A sample report of the SDK usage graph is available on the web here.
The Ant build file that produced the report is available here.
Get involved!
If you are interested in participating in the development of the API Tools component, check out the developer's mailing list: pde-dev@eclipse.org. Chat with people there about your problems and interests, and find out what you can do to help.
To get started you can check out the source for API Tools using either the extssh project set file (if you have a bugzilla account) or the pserver project set file (if you do not have a bugzilla account).