API Reviews
$Revision: 1.91 $ - history available
in CVS
Purpose of API Reviews
The API Review is an interactive online process that provides
architecture
review of a feature, change in code or anything else that can influence
the
way how NetBeans modules work and behave when assembled together to
form an
application.
Are you curious to know when,
how and why ask for a review? Then visit the description of the way we develop APIs.
The goal of the API Reviews is to supervise the architecture of
NetBeans IDE and
other products based on NetBeans and provide help and suggestions by
during the
reviews. In some way this is a NetBeans way of doing
review before
integration.
The result of a review can be a suggestion to choose different
solution, improve
the
implementation
metodologies,
development
techniques or
documentation.
The goal is to encourage the developers to look at their work from
point of view of their customers including end users, developers
building upon their libraries
(that is the reason for
strong
emphasis on usecases)
we apply our knowledge gained from maintaining NetBeans for past five
years to make the archictecture more sound and more maintainable.
The goal usually is not to do code reviews, more interesting are
aspects visible externally, but sometimes a review can suggest better
algorithms or internal data structures if there are for example
performance implications.
There are two types of reviews - Standard and
Fasttrack. Each one can suite different purposes, read more in the
step-by-step tutorial to learn what
you can get and how to ask for them.
How to Get Involved?
The requests for reviews are entered as regular issues into our bug
tracking system. They should be marked with keywords
API_REVIEW
or
API_REVIEW_FAST
and that is why it should be easy to query for them.
Moreover each review is started by CCing or reassigning the issue to
apireviews@netbeans.org
which automatically sends an email to
api-changes@netbeans.org
mailing list.
That is why subscribe to
api-changes@netbeans.org
mailing list or observe
What is currently happening?
query that
lists all issues that contain the API_REVIEW or API_REVIEW_FAST keyword
and are active, e.g. they were modified during last fourteen days.
Do you want to help with API reviews? Do you want to
be
notified when there is new review started? When an API changes? Then
subscribe
to api-changes@netbeans.org
mailing list.
The mailing list receives not only before commit notifications but also
daily notifications of what is happening in the codebase by using the
verification
framework.
This includes changes in files layout, public packages, signatures of
various
API classes, module dependencies, etc. If you want to get daily
notification
about the general changes being made, this is the source of information
you have been looking for as the mailing list allows
to observe the current state of the NetBeans codebase.
Reviews in Progress
For each standard review there is an issue describing the problem, linking
to appropriated documentation, potentially a review document:
Accepted Reviews
Accepted reviews, are listed here. Each of the issue contains
information about the problem, list of material, set of technical
changes requires or advices and a resolution:
Rejected Reviews
Rejected reviews were withdrawn or rejected without implementation.
Each issue shall contain details describing the motivation and reasons
for not implementing it:
Additional Queries
Comments or suggestions how to enhance this document send to
nbdev@netbeans.org mailing list
please.
