On 11/23/06, Henri Yandell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
JIRA reports are good - we've a big backlog in BeanUtils but it's starting to go down. There are a couple of other similar issues (BEANUTILS-157 + BEANUTILS-87). I don't know why the API is designed to only work with public methods; whether that's an aspect of adherence to the spec, by design or legacy. Seems that if we're going to use setAccessible, that we could just open it to package and private too. Anyone know why MethodUtils intentionally limits itself?
There is indeed a large dose of "legacy" here ... the early versions of BeanUtils (which came out of Struts in the pre-1.0 days) were never consciously designed to be a general purpose bean property manipulation library (i.e. the "BeanUtils" moniker was something of a stretch :-). The sole initial intents were to provide for the type conversions that Digester needed, plus the "copy request parameters to a form bean" that the 1.xversion of a Struts ActionForm needed. Hence, there was never any initial consideration for supporting the more esoteric cases that a general purpose framework would need to support. If BeanUtils is going to continue to evolve on the trajectory that seems to be epitomized by recent comments on the mailing list and in JIRA issues, it will need to be modified to deal with scenarios like this. On the other hand, more modern approaches to both configuration management (alternative strategies for parsing configuration files plus completely different approaches like JAXB), plus the decoupling of modern web frameworks from hard coded things like a Struts ActionForm, means that my personal need to care about what happens in BeanUtils is pretty much zero. I don't consider it an appropriate place to do innovative development, but if you are interested in improving support for legacy applications then it is (of course) fertile ground for incremental improvements -- some of which could be pretty substantial improvements in usabilty. Have at it ... but you'll find me watching from the sidelines. Hen Craig McClanahan
