On Friday, February 8, 2002, at 02:41 AM, Arno de Quaasteniet wrote:
A valid criticism, but it's a little late in the game for that.
You have a point about that but on the other hand the API isn't exactly widely adopted yet :)
It's widely used though, simply because dbXML, eXist and now Xindice use it. It may not be used in any big installations, but it is definitely used in a whole bunch of little ones.
I don't necessarily agree that it's too late to make some significant changes though. We've never said the API is complete or stable. If the changes are really necessary and improve things then we'll consider it, though, the idea of changing names is one I'm not currently fond of. If I'
d seen a large amount of confusion from users I'd feel differently, but I haven't really seen it. We've had the API in use for about a year and in that time hundreds of people have used it.
I think the getServices method is useless. It just adds an extra way to get a service object. I don't see the value of that. If its just for querying what services are supported then it should just stick to that. Though you could also check if a service exists by using the getService method, so even for that usage it would be unnecessary
You're right, if that method does anything, it should probably return a list of service names rather then service instances.
When it comes to API I tend to think less is more....
I agree.
Wrapping of course is always possible, but not prefered at all.
I just want to add one remark at this, which is more a practical matter. At X-Hive we initially also took the approach of creating "typed" iterators resolving in a huge amount of iterator classes, which essentially did nothing more than casting. At a certain point we decided to drop this approach, en just use java.util.Iterator, we did this because we feeled that these Iterator interface polluted both the documentation and the source code.
I wish we could do this, unfortunately the API really does need to be language independent. We could of course name things the same as Java since it is the most common implementation language. Whether it's really worth doing or not I don't know.
Kind regards,
Arno de Quaasteniet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Read archived messages: http://archive.xmldb.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kimbro Staken XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/
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