Difference between revisions of "PDE UI Incubator ApiTools Compare"

Revision as of 17:09, 2 February 2007

API Comparison Tool

What is it for?

The tool compares APIs exposed by two versions of your product. It reports changes that might break backward compatibility and provides a list of backward-compatible modifications.

Reports are produced as XML and HTML files. Here is the sample report:

What’s an API?

Good question. For starters here are some links; more information will be added later to this section.

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

How does the tool work?

The tool contains two operations: create an API snapshot and compare the code against API snapshot.

Both operations can be accessed via menus or run in a batch mode.

The dialog to create API snapshot looks like this:

And the dialog to compare code with the API snapshot looks like this:

Getting the Pieces

Source code is stored in the PDE incubator (:pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/eclipse) in the HEAD/pde-incubator/api-tooling/plugins.

There are two plug-ins:

• org.eclipse.pde.api.tools
• org.eclipse.pde.api.tools.ui

The Eclipse 3.3M4 or later should be used to compile those plug-ins.

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.