Re: XInfo vs Spice metadata

Hi,

> > It also means users can add their own metadata with very little hassle.
>
> Why can't you use both approaches?

You can but encoding metadata into code either via marker interfaces or
whatever is a hack that I would never recomend. So I would discourage it.

> How often is the schema for your components really changing?

The xinfo format changed probably 10 times in 4 years - most of which was
forward compatible. However we would have liked to have changed it a lot
more often - it was just stuck with fears of having to support each change.
At various times we have wanted traditional enterprise metadata (ie
trransactions, security, remoting, session enabling etc) but other people
have also wanted other metadata.

ie annotating implementation so that XSelector or XManager objects could
create better ways of Selecting/Searching/Querying components.

> > We still do this. Currently we unmarshall the attribute metadata into
two
> > "rich" object models. The ComponentInfo object (for component metadata)
and
> > the MBeanModelInfo object (for management metadata). I am sure that
future
> > features will also map into rich object models if it is demanded.
>
> Ok, where are you doing that? Maybe I'll just lift that. I'm still
> aiming for Loom/Plexus interop at the component level.

IIRC it is something like

jcontainer/loom/engine/src/java/org/jcontainer/loom/components/util/infobuil
der/*