Re: Generating Avalon meta information using apt

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:34:39 +0800, Niclas Hedhman <[email protected]>  
wrote:

> Unfortunately, we need to bag this proposal for a year or two.
> Magic will remain 1.4 compatible for quite some to come.
> Merlin still has a 1.3 compatibility ambition, but we are likely to up  
> to 1.4
> "soon".
>
> I can't see that you can maintain that at the same time as your proposal.
> Furthermore, we also need to maintain compatibility with existing tag  
> set and
> its syntax.
>
> Love to hear if you manage to sort out all of that.

Well, actually this would just be an *alternate* way of specifying meta  
informations. The processor does nothing more than the current plugin  
does: Generate some XML files. Of course, a component that uses  
annotations will need to be compiled with a Java5 compiler and therefore  
must run in a Java5 environment. But people who want to use the old system  
can continue doing so.

I myself currently use two systems: "Classic" avalon-meta for components I  
don't want to lift to Java5 (yet), and manually maintaining xinfo files  
for components that are targeted to Java5.

And, as a spontaneous idea, it could even be possible to compile  
components using annotations in a way that still allows to use them in a  
1.3 environment, although this would seem a bit hackish. :)

You can invoke apt with the -nocompile flag to generate the files only  
without compiling anything. The problem here is: The annotations are still  
present in the sources and a 1.3 compiler wouldn't like them very much. To  
work around this, the processor could furthermore generate new Java  
sources with the annotations filtered out. Afterwards, use a Java 1.3  
compiler on that output. As I noted, hackish, but theoretically possible  
...

cu,
    Raffi

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raffael herzog
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