Some long needed changes/improvements to the finder API.
XBEAN-165: Meta Annotation Support
XBEAN-166 : Class Name Filtering for Optimized Scanning
XBEAN-171: RegexFilteredArchive supporting regular expressions to
include/exclude classes from scanning
XBEAN-172: PrefixFilteredArchive supports "startsWith" list of accepted
prefixes
XBEAN-173: PackageFilteredArchive supports strict list of accepted package
names
XBEAN-167: Archive Interface for cleaner integration of Classpath and OSGi
based systems
XBEAN-168: ClassesArchive for static class list finder support
XBEAN-169: ClasspathArchive for traditional java classpath finder support
XBEAN-170: BundleArchive for OSGi bundle finder support
The first, meta annotations, is probably less interesting in Geronimo terms,
but the second two classes of changes are major improvements.
Rather than subclassing I've attempted to abstract out the few parts that are
different and switch us over to a delegation based model. Once that was done
adding wrapping/decorating of the delegates to achieve filtering was a natural
next step. A bit reason I'm not fan of subclassing as in that model doing this
kind of shared filtering would require all the subclasses to inherit from this
new "filtering" parent which would in turn now subclass from the original
parent. And that is an oversimplification as you can't really wrap abstract
methods like that -- a filtering parent class can't call "subclass.doThis()"
and mutate the result in it's own "doThis()" method, so you end up with more
abstract methods. Delegation is also composable, whereas you can't dynamically
change your parent class to use or not use the common filtering parent class.
Anyway enough about that :)
So what we have now is a composable system. You create your finder and feed it
an archive, like so:
new AnnotationFinder( new BundleArchive() );
If you want some filtering, you add that in:
new AnnotationFinder( new PackageFilteredArchive( new BundleArchive(),
"org.foo" ) );
And if some day we decide we want to support some sort of mashing of OSGi and
traditional sources, we could create an Archive implementation to combine them,
like so:
new AnnotationFinder(
new PackageFilteredArchive(
new CompositeArchive(
new BundleArchive(),
new ClasspathArchive()
),
"org.foo"
)
);
Sky is the limit.
Some concrete things I need help with.
1) Finishing the BundleArchive. I have stub in there based on the subclass
version. But the subclass "pushed" classes into the finder and the new
approach is a "pull". Anyone who has any time, please grab XBEAN-170 and
assign it to yourself. It's up for grabs.
2) Converting all the code from AbstractFinder to AnnotationFinder. Once we
get #1 finished, we'll need to roll the code over. It should be fairly easy as
the effective API is the same, just the way we construct things is different.
Still in the works:
1) Tests for all the filters
2) An SAXParser style error handler -- the whole classesNotLoaded thing is
going bye-bye
3) Finishing the ClasspathArchive and Meta Annotation support for fields
-David
