Re: [hibernate-dev] [HV] Design philosophy

Hi, > When adding a feature, we have always implicitly asked ourselves this pool of questions: > > 1. Does it feel like the right way of doing things? > If it's not, we have been prone to wait till we mature on the idea. Take collection element constraints as a good example. We know the right way but > it's not available to us yet > 2. Can I do it with an existing construct with similar or less complexity? > 3. Is this feature wrong? eg validating unicity with a database query is wrong. > 4. Is this a popular request? > 5. Is this feature useful in the general scheme? "What's your use case?" mantra. > 6. Is it the most readable approach? > 7. Is the feature designed consistently with the rest of the library That's a really valuable catalogue of questions. Is it available in the Wiki somewhere? I think it might make sense to have some manifest or charter like this publicly available, so that we can use it as base for discussions such as the one at hand, but also as reference for users why we're leaving out certain feature requests.

On using reg exps in general, I guess their power (and thus complexity) is their strength and weakness at the same time. So another idea might be to provide simplified means of specifying patterns by only using "*" (and maybe "?") as placeholder (as known from Windows search): @Email(pattern="*(a)hibernate.org") or @Email @SimplePattern("*(a)hibernate.org") I think that's reads pretty well and might be sufficient for most use cases (and all others could still use @Pattern).