[jbosscache-dev] JBCACHE-471 - Handling JGroups MERGE

[Manik Surtani]

On 20 Mar 2008, at 04:08, Brian Stansberry wrote:
> Manik Surtani wrote:
>> On 19 Mar 2008, at 19:26, Brian Stansberry wrote:
>
> <snip/>
>
>>>
>>> What's your gut feel on whether this will happen for 2.2?
>> I think it's possible if that's where we set our sights.  At the  
>> end of the day, we'd include an interface and an adapter with no-op  
>> methods, and if people stick to using the adapter, the interface in  
>> question can later be enhanced for 3.x if need be with more  
>> sophisticated overloaded callbacks, to create more sophisticated  
>> handlers.
>> In terms of my preference, I'd *like* to get it out for 2.2 to give  
>> the community more time to play with it, write handlers, etc., and  
>> help shape a more formal interface in 3.x.  Perhaps it could be  
>> marked as a "preview" feature, prone to change/enhancements in 3.x?
>
> That certainly takes some of the pressure off the interface  
> discussion. :-) As long as it's "preview" in the sense of "we might  
> change this a lot in 3.x" and not in the sense of "these 2 impls we  
> provide are not quite production ready."  If it's the latter,  
> probably not worth doing.

Agreed.  In terms of implementation, the 2 that I hope to provide at  
first will be production ready - they're too simple _not_ to be.  So  
the only really hard part that we face here is pinning down the  
interface design to something that will be continually useful in the  
future, for more complex merge handler implementations.  And as long  
as we caveat the interface with a "prone to change in 3.x based on  
user feedback", we'd set an expectation that anyone who writes their  
own merge handler now *may* have to rewrite it in 3.x.  And in any  
case any interface changes would likely add parameters, not remove  
any, so such a "rewrite" would be trivial.  Like I said, I'm just keen  
to "get it out there", and let people start playing with it.

And as Bela mentioned, I'm happy to brainstorm over this on the next  
conf call, but no harm in dumping thoughts and ideas on this mail list  
until then.  :-)

Cheers,
--
Manik Surtani
Lead, JBoss Cache
manik at jboss.org