General Information

Question (arch-what): What is this project good for?
Answer:

The legacy settings system in the editor module is complicated, error prone and hard to use. It'd been created spontaneously over the years to support immediate needs at that time without paying enough attention to extensibility and interoperability. Historically any module providing editor settings needed to depend on the whole editor module.

The main purpose of this project is to define API for editor settings, that is lightweight and easily extensible. The API relies on MimeLookup to provide a way of registering and looking up settings. The aim is NOT to provide an implementation of a storage for editor settings, but to define an interface between this storage and clients like <mime-type> editors, externaleditor, etc.

Question (arch-overall): Describe the overall architecture.
Answer:

The editor/settings module consists of several EditorSettingsAPI - API classes for accessing editor related settings. The classes are stored in the org.netbeans.api.editor.settings package. Each class is responsible for a different group of settings:

• FontColorSettings - the map of names (i.e. Strings) of colorings and their parameters (i.e. AttributeSets).
• CodeTemplateSettings - the map of template names (i.e. Strings) and their bodies (i.e. Strings).
• KeyBindingSettings - the list of MultiKeyBindings. Each MultiKeyBinding is a list of keyboard shortcuts associated to an Action.

Editor settings for a particular mime type can be obtained through MimeLookup

    MimePath mimePath = MimePath.parse("text/x-java");
    FontColorSettings fcs  = (FontColorSettings) MimeLookup.getLookup(mimePath).lookup(FontColorSettings.class);

Question (arch-usecases): Describe the main use cases of the new API. Who will use it under what circumstances? What kind of code would typically need to be written to use the module?
Answer:

Accessing settings

All editor settings are mime type specific and therefore should be retrieved using MimeLookup. The following example shows how to retrieve the FontColorSettings for java files and how to get AttributeSet with coloring attributes for a particular coloring (i.e. in this case the colors used for highlighting selected text)

    MimePath mimePath = MimePath.parse("text/x-java");
    FontColorSettings fcs  = (FontColorSettings) MimeLookup.getLookup(mimePath).lookup(FontColorSettings.class);
    AttributeSet coloring = fcs.getFontColors(FontColorNames.SELECTION_COLORING);

Listening on changes

If clients need to react on changes in editor settings they can attach LookupListener to the LookupResult they got for their particular settings class from MimeLookup. The following example shows how to do it.

    MimePath mimePath = MimePath.parse("text/x-java");
    Lookup lookup = MimeLookup.getLookup(mimePath);
    LookupResult result = lookup.lookup(new Lookup.Template(FontColorSettings.class));
    
    result.addLookupListener(new LookupListener() {
        public void resultChanged(LookupEvent ev) {
            //... the client's response to the settings change
        }
    });

The FontColorSettings class implementor is responsible and will create a new instance of FontColorSettings whenever some coloring will change. This new instance will be placed in MimeLookup replacing the old one.

Question (arch-time): What are the time estimates of the work?
Answer: The modules is available in CVS trunk.
Question (arch-quality): How will the quality of your code be tested and how are future regressions going to be prevented?
Answer: There are unit tests available covering the module's functionality.
Question (arch-where): Where one can find sources for your module?
Answer:

The sources for the module are in NetBeans CVS in editor/settings directory.

Project and platform dependencies

Question (dep-nb): What other NetBeans projects and modules does this one depend on?
Answer:

These modules are required in project.xml:

Question (dep-non-nb): What other projects outside NetBeans does this one depend on?
Answer: No other projects.
Question (dep-platform): On which platforms does your module run? Does it run in the same way on each?
Answer: All platforms.
Question (dep-jre): Which version of JRE do you need (1.2, 1.3, 1.4, etc.)?
Answer: JDK1.4 and higher can be used.
Question (dep-jrejdk): Do you require the JDK or is the JRE enough?
Answer: JRE is sufficient.

Deployment

Question (deploy-jar): Do you deploy just module JAR file(s) or other files as well?
Answer: No additional files.
Question (deploy-nbm): Can you deploy an NBM via the Update Center?
Answer: Yes.
Question (deploy-shared): Do you need to be installed in the shared location only, or in the user directory only, or can your module be installed anywhere?
Answer: Anywhere.
Question (deploy-packages): Are packages of your module made inaccessible by not declaring them public?
Answer: Yes, only the API is public. There is no implementation in the editor/settings module.
Question (deploy-dependencies): What do other modules need to do to declare a dependency on this one, in addition to or instead of the normal module dependency declaration (e.g. tokens to require)?
Answer: Nothing.

Compatibility with environment

Question (compat-i18n): Is your module correctly internationalized?
Answer: Yes.
Question (compat-standards): Does the module implement or define any standards? Is the implementation exact or does it deviate somehow?
Answer: Compatible with standards.
Question (compat-version): Can your module coexist with earlier and future versions of itself? Can you correctly read all old settings? Will future versions be able to read your current settings? Can you read or politely ignore settings stored by a future version?
Answer: No persistance is used for editor/settings module.
Question (compat-deprecation): How the introduction of your project influences functionality provided by previous version of the product?
Answer: No changes.

Access to resources

Question (resources-file): Does your module use java.io.File directly?
Answer: No.
Question (resources-layer): Does your module provide own layer? Does it create any files or folders in it? What it is trying to communicate by that and with which components?
Answer: No.
Question (resources-read): Does your module read any resources from layers? For what purpose?
Answer: No.
Question (resources-mask): Does your module mask/hide/override any resources provided by other modules in their layers?
Answer: No.
Question (resources-preferences): Does your module uses preferences via Preferences API? Does your module use NbPreferences or or regular JDK Preferences ? Does it read, write or both ? Does it share preferences with other modules ? If so, then why ?
Answer: No.

Lookup of components

Question (lookup-lookup): Does your module use org.openide.util.Lookup or any similar technology to find any components to communicate with? Which ones?
Answer: No. It only defines the classes that can be looked up via MimeLookup.
Question (lookup-register): Do you register anything into lookup for other code to find?
Answer: No.
Question (lookup-remove): Do you remove entries of other modules from lookup?
Answer: No.

Execution Environment

Question (exec-property): Is execution of your code influenced by any environment or Java system (System.getProperty) property? On a similar note, is there something interesting that you pass to java.util.logging.Logger? Or do you observe what others log?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-component): Is execution of your code influenced by any (string) property of any of your components?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-ant-tasks): Do you define or register any ant tasks that other can use?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-classloader): Does your code create its own class loader(s)?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-reflection): Does your code use Java Reflection to execute other code?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-privateaccess): Are you aware of any other parts of the system calling some of your methods by reflection?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-process): Do you execute an external process from your module? How do you ensure that the result is the same on different platforms? Do you parse output? Do you depend on result code?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-introspection): Does your module use any kind of runtime type information (instanceof, work with java.lang.Class, etc.)?
Answer: No.
Question (exec-threading): What threading models, if any, does your module adhere to? How the project behaves with respect to threading?
Answer: No special threading models used.
Question (security-policy): Does your functionality require modifications to the standard policy file?
Answer: No.
Question (security-grant): Does your code grant additional rights to some other code?
Answer: No.

Format of files and protocols

Question (format-types): Which protocols and file formats (if any) does your module read or write on disk, or transmit or receive over the network? Do you generate an ant build script? Can it be edited and modified?
Answer: No files read or written to the disk.
Question (format-dnd): Which protocols (if any) does your code understand during Drag & Drop?
Answer: No D&D.
Question (format-clipboard): Which data flavors (if any) does your code read from or insert to the clipboard (by access to clipboard on means calling methods on java.awt.datatransfer.Transferable?
Answer: No clipboard support.

Performance and Scalability

Question (perf-startup): Does your module run any code on startup?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-exit): Does your module run any code on exit?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-scale): Which external criteria influence the performance of your program (size of file in editor, number of files in menu, in source directory, etc.) and how well your code scales?
Answer: There is no performance sensitive code in editor/settings module.
Question (perf-limit): Are there any hard-coded or practical limits in the number or size of elements your code can handle?
Answer: No limits.
Question (perf-mem): How much memory does your component consume? Estimate with a relation to the number of windows, etc.
Answer: No specific memory usage.
Question (perf-wakeup): Does any piece of your code wake up periodically and do something even when the system is otherwise idle (no user interaction)?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-progress): Does your module execute any long-running tasks?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-huge_dialogs): Does your module contain any dialogs or wizards with a large number of GUI controls such as combo boxes, lists, trees, or text areas?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-menus): Does your module use dynamically updated context menus, or context-sensitive actions with complicated and slow enablement logic?
Answer: No.
Question (perf-spi): How the performance of the plugged in code will be enforced?
Answer: No pluggins allowad.