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From: Jesse Glick <jesse.glick@sun.com>
Subject: Re: AW: [Fwd: Some Thoughts on Ant 1.3 and 2.0]
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 14:38:23 -0400
Organization: Sun Microsystems / NetBeans
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>> The Schema file is there to support GUI tools for example. They
>> could prompt for required attributes,

This would be nice!

>> let you select enumerated attributes from a list,

FWIW, NetBeans would not need this - currently loads the 
EnumeratedAttribute subclass on the fly and uses it for code completion. 
But having this information in a static declarative format might be better.

Relying on such a format might not be a good idea unless it were widely 
used and easy to create, though - I think it's pretty common to just 
write a one-off task that you use in a script as needed, and it's nice 
for a tool to be able to offer code completion and other structural help 
with such a custom task. (E.g. NB analyzes custom tasks when you run a 
script which defines them, as a heuristic.) The nice thing about apt is 
that it could ensure that all the needed info is right there in the 
java.lang.Class - not good for general docs but nice for finding 
required attributes and that sort of thing. Not available for JDK 
1.2-1.4 though.

BTW I just had a thought - should use of EnumeratedAttribute be required 
for JDK 5 users? Maybe you should be able to just do something like

public enum WhenEmptyAction {fail, create, skip}
public class SomeTask {
     public void setWhenempty(WhenEmptyAction action) {...}
     public void execute() {...}
}

>> require integer attributes to really contain numbers ...

I think the signature of the task class already handles this case, 
right? setSomething(int)?

Jan.Materne@rzf.fin-nrw.de wrote:
> How the IDEs solve that at the moment?

For required attributes, you can't solve it that I know of, without 
hardcoding attribute names for well-known tasks (or trying to parse the 
HTML tables in the docs, or something icky like that).

-J.

-- 
jesse.glick@sun.com   x22801   netbeans.org   ant.apache.org
if I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself


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