Re: [eclipse-dev] About API Tools results analysis

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

João Arthur <joaoarthurbm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on 07/25/2013
02:33:14 PM:
> Would you say that these the problems (internal or friend clients)
> are less relevant than the others? 
> is there any way to exclude them from the restrictions?

Yes internal references are fine, and they can be
excluded from report using API tools filters. That is probably what happened
in 4.2 when you saw a large number of these problems "fixed".


> 
> About 2. Fantastic explanation! :)
> 
> Let me ask you, is there any other way to get advantage 
> of TreeViewer without extending it? I'm trying to understand
whether
> the restriction should be changed or the way developers 
> use TreeViewer should change.

JFace viewers are probably a good case study all by
themselves. As Boris mentioned it has many "approved" ways for
clients to customize it. The Strategy pattern is used to allow clients
to change what items appear, how they are displayed, sorted, filtered,
etc. A listener can be attached that can be used for other kinds of custom
behaviour. However because the API itself is a hierarchy of various levels
of specialized Viewers, it offers much more control to subclasses than
to clients. I.e., subclasses within the JFace framework need to customize
much more than a typical client. Since the classes are not final it is
tempting for clients to use subclassing to get that extra level of control
for cases that are not supported by the official API.

John