Sure, I know what annotations are =) but I was wondering how you saw them being used? Do you have an example in your mind?
I'm not so sure they are appropriate in this case. In Eclipse an extension point isn't always related to some Java code. For instance, in Eclipse you can configure perspectives and menu items declaratively in the plugin.xml. Attaching code to them is optional. In fact ( with regards to building the UI anyway) most of the time, you would only provide Java code where you really need to specialise something. Eclipse RCP provides a lot of functionality out of the box and uses the concept of Perspectives, Editors, Views Panes, etc, taking much of the thought process about how to structure an application out of the hands of developers so they can concentrate actually implementing the functionality. I see Pivot much more free-form that that, but I think I can still see the value in providing an OSGi based 'Kernel'. Cheers, Chris 2009/3/26 Greg Brown <[email protected]> > >> This seems like a great use case for annotations. I wonder how Felix > >> handles this. > >Felix is an implementation of the OSGi spec, so it'll be using the service > >registry approach and doesn't provide a UI that I'm aware of. > > I was thinking that Todd's "Pivot kernel" could provide such a UI, and > could use Felix under the hood. This would allow us to create something > along the lines of Eclipse RCP in Pivot (though we'd obviously want to > package this in its own JAR(s) because not all app developers will want to > use it). The application Todd mentioned in his previous message (the one > that used the extension point API) could have taken advantage of such a > framework if it were available at the time. > > >How do you see annotations being used to declare/define extension points? > >Or I have missed the point? > > Annotations are a way to provide metadata about a class or library, in the > same way that XML is often used to do so. However, annotations are a > language feature and are easier to access at runtime. > >
