[BBB-DEV] org.jdesktop.beansbinding.Property should be interface

[Peter Levart <peter.levart@marand.si>]

Hello BB/BBB-ers!

I don't know why (maybe Shannon Hickey could tell us?) org.jdesktop.beansbinding.Property is an abstract class and not an interface. It forces all Property implementations to extend it. I think there is justification to change it to interface (the fix is simple and any implementations extending Property directly can trivially be adjusted).

While source compatibility with old code would only affect direct subclasses of Property (extends -> implements), binary compatibility on the other hand is not possible to maintain (invokevirtual/invokeinterface).

There are situations where a custom property implementation would like to be just an aspect of the whole type and code would like to use interfaces. For example. I'm playing with the idea of poor-man's compiler support for properties. Currently no language-level changes, just something that could maybe someday be supported in language.

The idea is simple: http://kenai.com/projects/betterbeansbinding/pages/PeterLevartWhiteBoard

But I have a problem of creating something even more usefull because org.jdesktop.beansbinding.Property is not an interface.

Is it possible to change it to interface?

Regards, Peter