On Monday 18 October 2004 18:29, Andrew Evers wrote:
> The use of these types comes from our desire (and our users desire)
> to work with Java 1.1, often in Applets in a web browser. This
> unfortunately means that the more abstract collections framework
> introduced in 1.2 is not available.
IMHO it would be a good idea to make the next version support the
collections API (maybe common-collections as well?) and let JDK 1.1
users (AFAIK, MS-IE users who don't wont to install sun's jdk?) use the
current 1.2 version. BTW - when will 1.2 stop being a "beta" ?
> While Collection has a toArray() method, Vector (or maybe List) are
> better interfaces, since some collections (eg. Map, Set) don't have
> any consideration for order. An array has a definite order.
Map is not a collection (in the sense that it inherits
java.util.Collection). For the "struct" type supporting it is enough If
order is important, and I think that the XML-RPC "array" type is meant
to be ordered, then you should use List and not Collection. Vector is
not a better interface then List - mostly because its not really an
interface but an implementation.
IMO, the writeObject() method should still accept Collection as a valid
"array" type with the caveat (and warning clearly displayed in the java
api doc) that unless the collection enforces ordering, in the XML-RPC
call the order will not be preserved or well defined.
> We've not
> (to my knowledge) had any issues reported to do with synchronized
> access to a Vector.
There shouldn't be any problem with the synchronization of Vector -
aside that its completly unrequired when in a single thread context and
just slows you down - whenever you are using Vector and don't need its
synchronization features you'd be better off with an ArrayList which
offers the exact same implementation w/o the overhead of
synchronization. Also Vector might have other performance issues: under
some usage parameters LinkedList will perform several order of
magnitude better then Vector. Due to the limitation of using only
Vector for XML-RPC "array" type, we have one piece of code which
actually converts a LinkedList is uses to gather data into a Vector
before submitting to XML-RPC.
> There is a general sentiment that supporting the Collections API in
> the next version would be a good idea. However, the library is
> relatively mature, we do want to keep the current API
I don't see how the API will change when expanding the ammount of type
supported - this clearly has no compile time issues and the run-time
behavior will be much better.
--
Oded Arbel
m-Wise mobile solutions
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+972-9-9611212 (204)
+972-54-7340014
::..
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