3.3M6 JFace Data Binding API Changes

3.3M6 was the API freeze and JFace Data Binding had a few changes in regards to API that were necessary for 1.0. All API changes can be found with this query. The most dramatic changes can be found in bugs 175840 and 177463.

175840 - [DataBinding] Remove BindingListener/BindingEvent from the API

The title doesn't quite do this justice. The change that will effect most consumers is that we removed BindSpec and the configuration of bindings has changes because of this. We have introduced 2 new classes to replace BindSpec: UpdateValueStrategy and UpdateListStrategy.

177463 - [DataBinding] SWT Observable API additions

The essence of this change is that all SWTObservables.observe*(...) methods are now untyped meaning they all accept a type of Control. This was done in anticipation of supporting multiple SWT versions. If we were to put the latest and greatest widgets in the method signatures it would prohibit us from using this class with Eclipse 3.2.

Minor API changes before 3.3M4

We're getting close to 3.3M4 (Friday Dec. 15, 2006) when we're hoping to have all API changes to JFace Data Binding complete. The changes are minor but if you're using the current code you might want to peruse the list to determine if you'll be effected.

1. bug 118429 - IValidator will now return IStatus instead of a string.


2. bug 147530 - Event notifications on observables will pass an event object rather than the the source and diff as separate parameters.


3. bug 164653 - Changes to the protected APIs in the abstract observable implementations for thread safety.


4. bug 128142 - IDomainValidator is being replaced with IValidator.

Again, they're all pretty minor and shouldn't take long to correct in consuming code.

Also we had a team meeting on November 30th, 2006. The notes can be found here. We tried to record the audio but alas, the service was having issues that night.

20061212 Update:
Another small change has occurred on the race to 3.3M4.

1. bug 167450 - remove BindSupportFactory, a couple of methods are now gone from DataBindingContext