PDE/API Tools

Welcome to the API Tooling Wiki Page.

API tooling is a collection of utilities that can be used in API maintenance and consistency checks. At present it has two portions: API comparison tool and API reference extractor.

API Comparison tool

API Comparison tool: discovers backward compatibility problems and new APIs

The tool can be used to create API snapshot of a set of bundles / jars / directories. The snapshot is used as a baseline to compare against another version of the source code to discover problems in API backward compatibility and new APIs.

The tool is written in modular fashion. It has an “engine” with replaceable input and output. Presently OSGi bundles, Java jars, and directories can be used as an input sources. The snapshot output is saved into zip-ed xml file. Comparison results are produced as XML file which is transformed into HTML for ease of reading.

At this time only can be executed from Eclipse environment. UI and command line invocation will be added shortly.

To use it at this time:

• Install Eclipse SDK 3.2 and download org.eclipse.pde.api.tools and org.eclipse.pde.api.tools.ui plugins from dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/eclipse, folder pde-incubator/api-tooling/plugins
• Create a baseline for comparison: Depending on what is the source for the comparison, modify CollectAllBundles.java / CollectBundle.java / CollectFile.java to point to the source being used as a base. Run them as a JUnit plugin test to create a baseline
• To compare modify CompareAllBundles.java / CompareBundle.java / CompareBundleInProduct.java / CompareFile.java to point to your current code and the baseline created in the previous step. Run the modified java file as a JUnit plugin test. The HTML files will be producted with non-backward compatible differences and backward-compatible differences

Reference extraction tool

Reference extraction tool: produces list of references to all “outside” code

The result of the extraction is saved as an XML file grouped by the classes and interfaces used in the code.

Links

Evolving Java-based APIs - What is considered an API in Eclipse.

Resources

Eclipse Bugzilla - Eclipse bug tracking database.

PDE Incubator - New projects that might be incorporated into PDE in future.

PDE UI Home Page - The main PDE UI web site.